Jocko Podcast - 331: Don't Just Stand There and Do Nothing. Look For Work, Because That's Where The Opportunity Is. W/ Ben Milligan Pt.3

Episode Date: April 27, 2022

0:00:00 - Opening0:01:20 - By Water Beneath The Walls with Ben Milligan.3:02:38 - How to stay on THE PATH. 3:11:33 - Closing Gratitude.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocco Podcast number 331 with Echo Charles and me, Joccoe Willing. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. Also joining us for the back-to-back episodes, Ben Milligan, author of the book by water beneath the walls. If you haven't listened to Podcast 330, go back and listen that one. If you really want to start at the beginning of the Ben Milligan experience, then you got to go back and listen to 298. Ben Milligan, a former SEAL teammate of mine who has written this incredible book about the history of special operations and how from this convoluted, contorted history, there ends up being this random group of men from the Navy that become the go anywhere, commando of choice. for the military.

So there you go. Ben. Well said. Thanks for coming back, man. Said better than I could. So we got barely in three hours on the last podcast. We got through World War II in this convoluted crazy story of hits and misses of surfaces and gaps.

And we're going to roll into now the post-war period. Post-war Korea. When I was writing the book, I really didn't want to have a book that was half World War II and half everything else, but it's kind of how it ended up. And now we just end up with a podcast that's half World War II and then half everything else. I mean, how can you not, though? Like when I was thinking about it, like I cover six chapters on World War II, and then there's nine chapters of everything else. But, you know, a third of the book is, you know, World War II. and, you know, justifiably so.

And World War II is, you know, to war. Everything else that we've ever, you know, most horrible war in history. And, you know, in my World War II section, it covers, you know, six different theaters of operations. So, I mean, it makes sense that it would. So I don't feel as bad about it when I set out.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let's jump into Chapter 7, which is the U.S. Navy's post-war plight and the sailor, Raiders who led her back to significance in Korea. Yeah, we'll continue.

You can see we continue, Ben, with his long-winded chapter titles. So those aren't even subtitles, right? That's the actual chapter title. Each chapter title is the chapter one. That's the chapter title. And then the subtitle is that. Yeah, because this chapter could have been called Chapter 7, Post-war. In my defense, I had much tighter chapter titles until my editor got a hold of these.

I like how you're taking ownership of that. I like how you're blaming your editor. Now, you're right. It is the other person's fault. You're right. It is. I haven't liked my chapter titles. And for some of these, I spend more time writing the chapter titles.

You imagine trying to compress 30 years of, you know, a chapter into, you know, a single sentence. Like you're just, I mean, you're doing the absolute best that you can to like, one, give your, your reader some idea of what's about to you know, what they're about to, you know, undertake. But, two, you don't want to give away anything. You don't want to say, like, I mean, I think the only chapter that I really give away, you know, I sort of, I give you, you know, some foreshadowing, you know, the, the raid that wasn't, which is the chapter on the Rangers, you have some sense that this isn't going to go the way that they think it's going to go.

And then, two, the, the first chapter on the Raiders, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the rise and the violent demise of the Navy's, right, the Navy's first raiders you want you know you're you're kind of you're giving your reader like a little taste of what's about to come the i i know i can be a little bit of a what is it a dart thrower from the back of the room about your about your titles and stuff but uh as as i said and this book is phenomenal this book is is when i when i read through this book um look the detail is amazing but you're a freaking hell of a writer too it's There's the things that you capture, the things that you call out, the dialogue that you've selected.

And what's cool is the dialogue that you've selected. This is a dialogue that's documented. This isn't like your authors. You don't do that anywhere in the book. You don't do anywhere in the book. You do the, you know, this is basically what was said. You don't do that anywhere, do you? It's all this is what was actually said recorded in this document.

There's only one time where I try to synthesize a conversation. I think that's when I have two different. two documents. One was Donovan's account of a conversation and then Miles' account of a conversation and they both, you know, are sort of like confirming what the other said. That's the only time where I tried to synthesize, you know, two separate conversations. Or there was another time when I was synthesizing, you know, the conversation that Hall and Mad Smith has with Kelly Turner about Tinian. And then there's a third account where Draper Kaufman is listening in on this conversation.

I'm trying to do my best to squeeze these three things into. Triangulate the different perspectives and try and come up with something that's close to what actually. They all essentially like agree with each other though. I mean, it's like, you know, you kind of know when something's true, when it doesn't exactly agree. Like if, you know, you're a platoon commander and, you know, two of your guys show up for an op and they both have black eyes. and you're like, what happened last night? And if they both have the exact same story, you know they're lying.

Yeah. You know what I mean? So if there's a slate, if there's, you know, if they both kind of rhyme with each other, but they're not exactly the same. They were just told from a different perspective.

Yeah. Well, it's an unbelievable book. It's a fantastic read. And it's a kind of book also. You can kind of pick up, this is sort of in the vein of about face, where in about face,

you can pick up that book and you can start to read it. And in four pages, three pages you go oh that's a good little lesson there's something to think about and this is this this the same way that this book works yes absolutely you read it from cover to cover but you have it sitting on your you know on your on your on your nightstand and you're not quite tired yet open this book up anywhere read three or four pages and you get a little lesson a little piece of history and also some kind of a leadership lesson in there so phenomenal from that perspective as well all right let's jump

into this a little bit. So tell me more about the revolt of the admirals. What happened with that? So after World War II, the joint chiefs or there's a there's a huge budget, you know, cut. I mean, there's nothing's ever happened like World War II. And World War II, like nothing's ever happened like the end of World War II, where, you know, the military, you know, the U.S. military prior to World War II has always had this sort of cycle where they build up to deal with whatever conflict, whether it was the American Civil War or the First World War or the Second World War. They grew from sort of a nucleus force to this massive industrial, you know, mobilized, you know, military. And then after it, you shrink back down to that nucleus force again.

So you can rebuild again later. After World War II, the U.S. military. or the U.S. public has finally learned its lesson. We can't shrink back. You can't be in this industrial or this era of total war and not field planes and massive ships. You have to keep a residual force afloat in the air. But there's still, you can't continue to spend what they were spending in World War II. So in the military shrinks. drastically. So all of the military entities are competing for very limited resources. But now that all of the world's, or all of the United States's enemies have been defeated, the one that still

exists is the Soviet Union. And planners don't expect that this is going to be a massive naval effort. The Soviet Union at that point doesn't have a, you know, a particularly big Navy or anything like that. We don't anticipate that we're ever going to need to land ships in the Soviet or land troops on the Soviet Union because we have this, you know, a huge presence in Western Europe. So planners in the Army and the Air Force are claiming that they need more of the resources, that the Navy doesn't need resources because we're never going to have amphibious warfare again. It's just not going to happen. Anything that the Navy could have done, all the troops that the Navy could have transported, the Air Force can do it with planes. Or we're already ashore anyway.

So take the money from the Navy, give it to the Army, especially give it to the Air Force. So the Air Force and the Army have convinced most of the top decision makers in the Truman administration that they're going to pull money, you know, rob from Peter to pay Paul. Well, the Navy sees this prospect of what is about to be done to them, about to be done to their service. And not only are they about to lose all of this money and all of this status, but they're about to be sort of declawed. You know, the Navy's not going to be like a force, an offensive warfare force anymore.

And the Navy planners are, you know, they're panicking. not just panicking for their service, but they realize how difficult, how complex expeditionary warfare is, and they're doing everything they can to save their service, and by saving the service, save the country. So they stage, essentially stage a coup. They, not a, not a coup, but they start leaking pressure or leaking stuff to, newspaper columnist. I talked about Merritt Edson, Red Mike Edson. He resigns from his commission in the Marine Corps so he can get out and start protesting publicly. Eventually, the clamor gets so bad that they have to call a committee hearing in the House, in Congress. And it's, you know, for several days,

it's a big to do. Like, they bring in just about every admiral, every famous admiral from World War II to testify in front of Congress. Yeah, I got a list of names here. Leahy, Blandy, Nimitz, Halsey, Spruence, Kincaid, Connolly, Carney, Burke, every blue water hero, save Kelly Turner, save Kelly Turner, Farragut, John Paul Jones. That is just basically everyone you could,

every pipe-hitting naval leader goes in and makes their case, makes their case for not taking all the money away from the Navy and giving it all to the Army and primarily the Air Force. No other force and no other nation, Denfield proclaimed could concentrate aircraft like the Navy, could seize advanced bases, could defend those bases, could promulgate underseas, amphibious warfare, could bring to Barrett's underwater demolition teams. It's mind sweepers and its radio telephone operators to control air and naval gunfire. At the conclusion of Denfield's testimony, a red-faced, speechless. Matthews stood and thundered from the committee room for a moment. It appeared the Navy had won. Interestingly, they even mentioned the underwater demolition teams.

I mean, they're so important in the Navy's order of battle at that point that absolutely they're going. And, you know, they grew, like I say in the book, they grew from three teams to 40. teams and each of these teams is a hundred as a hundred guys plus each one is assigned its own ship and not only that but they have an assorted all the all the protection that each one of these teams requires almost each one gets an LCIG gumboat plus all the battleships that came with that I mean the the UDTs have risen to the front rank of the Navy's amphibious warfare plan so but it fails the whole revolt fails And that's that.

Sort of. I mean, it's that until we go, until a completely unexpected event happens. The North Koreans invade the South. That's what we always need to be ready for, that unexpected event. Unexpected event. That no one anticipates. One of the things that we've been doing as we've been going through this book, the second time here, is talk about some of the characters that you were forced to cut out

because of just the prudence and and sympathy for your readers, what you'd like to tell me. Sympathy for the reader because you could literally make every one of these characters its own book. So tell me about Lewis A. Johnson. Louis A. Johnson is, I mean, he's a villain out of central casting. I mean, he's a total politician. He's a, I think he's a West, yeah, I know he is.

He's a West Virginia attorney. He's Truman's campaign director in his second campaign for office. His reward for getting Truman a second term is he becomes the Secretary of Defense, a position he's not particularly suited for. He doesn't have a huge military record. He did serve in the First World War. I think he was a supply officer. One of the things he did, one of the last things he did when he was still on active duty

as a Army supply officers, he issued a fairly scathing report of the Army's logistics efforts. He's always kind of been not an outsider, but sort of like the guy with the flames, or he does not like the institution that he was a part of. He thinks it could be run so much better. And when he sees the U.S. military, he sees redundancies everywhere, not just redundancies, but waste, waste, waste. He wants to get rid of all of it. He wants to come in, like I said, with a blow torch.

And he stops production of an aircraft carrier. I mean, after its keel has already been laid. He's taking money from the Navy and giving it right to the Air Force, almost $400 million in one fell swoop from the Navy to the Air Force. He is, I say, he's a person who never saw an arm without thinking how to twist it. One of my favorite lines from the book. Like he was, and, yeah, I mean, he's the, he's the, he's the, I call it, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the, he's the guy who sees, you know, the Navy is just a, you know, a waste of manpower, waste of resources. The Air Force can do everything, particularly with, with atomic weapons. Nobody else has them. There's no more war. This is the end of history for a lot of people. They think everything's, we're, we're done.

Perpetual peace. You know, when I first got into the Navy when I was a kid, I remember at some point, you know, I got to the team. Because in Buds, you're still in boot camp and in Buds, you're still kind of like isolated to what the Navy actually is and how it actually works, right? I remember going on my first trip at the SEAL teams. And for some reason, we had to, like, get gas for our vehicles. And we had to pay for the gas from the Navy, like, a supply. supply depot thing. We had a special card. And I thought, well, you think, you think just like, hey, man, it's the Navy. Like, they got gas. It's Navy gas. Like, we're in the Navy. They're in the Navy. Hey, cool. Or, oh,

we need to fly to some other state. Cool. Well, the Air Force is going to pick us up. And then we don't have to pay for that. They're in the Air Force. We're in the Navy, but we're all in the same big team. And you realize it's not like that at all. And that's why these budget, Registry discussions that happen they're so you wouldn't think that they would be a thing but they're they're the thing It's not just that they're a thing they are the thing and the way this money gets divvied up and luckily Luckily it ends up being a it for the most part a positive sort of competitive cycle of people trying to do good so that they can get more money which drives better results right But when you talk about efficiency, like if you were to look at the military just straight up from a pure efficiency, why does the army have boats?

Why does the army have helicopters? Why does the Navy have helicopters? Why does the Marine Corps have fighter jets? Why, you could just say, well, it doesn't make any sense at all. This is all redundant. If you're going to have one group in charge of the sky, make it the Air Force. You make one group in charge of the ocean, make it the, make it the Navy. We've got one group in charge of the land, make it the Army.

There's all kinds of efficiencies that you could kind of think and say, yeah, that makes some sense. But the reality is there's these seams and the seams need to be dealt with. And then you want to have, in a positive way, you want to have the Marine Corps that has fighter jets. And the Navy has fighter jets. And the Air Force has fighter jets. And the Army? Well, they have A10s. So close.

You see what I'm saying, but they all have Bradley fighting vehicles and, you know, armored vehicles. Well, what about the Army hasn't? But so does the Marine Corps. And you just go down these lists of where these things cross over, where the efficiencies are. And so this battle that we're talking about, that's a economic battle for the various forces, is a real thing that needs to be contended with. And that's sort of another thing as we go forward. that's going to continue to drive the seals to be coming to get created because as you know you mentioned all it seems like World War II is sort of the end of war for some people well if you want

to talk about naval battles Navy versus Navy it gets pretty close to say in that World War II is the end of war right it does for the Navy And so then what's the Navy doing? Well, we still had aircraft. Okay, that's cool. But that still is one step back from the people that are on the front lines making things happen. So I just wanted to bring that up from the perspective of where this all goes and how this all plays out. Ted Fielding.

Let's deal with Ted Fielding. Ted Fielding, Macbinton, George Atchison, these are all characters that are UDT off officers who are almost lost to history. They are that first rank of frogmen that kind of got to go back real quick. So when Korea kicks off, the geography of Korea determines a lot. Korea is a peninsula. It's accessible, you know, everywhere. you know, on every coast of it, you know, by, you know, naval guns, Navy ships.

But the mountains of Korea kind of preclude, you know, the highways being, you know, driven or built right down the center of the country. So most of the highways in Korea, most of the railroads in Korea, all major traffic is going to go up and down the skins of the country. So on either coast, you know, within 15 miles of the coast. the major arteries of the country are going to be, you know, established. So when the Inman Gun, or where the North Korean Army, when they attack, they push the South Korean military and the U.S. advisors,

they push them into this little pocket, you know, down to the far southeast corner of the country in what we call the Pusan perimeter. And the North Koreans are supplying their forces that are attacking this perimeter, you know, up and down these railways that are, you know, on the flanks of the coast or on the flanks of the peninsula. So the U.S. military, having disbanded the Army Rangers, having disbanded the Marine Corps Raiders, the Marine Vac Recong Company, all of these special operations units that had been created in World War II, none of these units exist. And all commanders want is to start fielding something that can help cut these supply lines to the North Korean Army.

And the first entity to see the opportunity there and to see the good that they can be doing on that, are the commanders in the U.S. Navy. They see these, but they don't have the troops to do it. And the only troops that are in country that they have are their frogmen, the underwater demolition teams. And they've never done any missions like this. They've never gone ashore. The furthest the UDTs have gone ashore are in Okinawa.

A couple of guys went inland to do a handful of things, but nothing serious. So when we get to Korea, because there are no raiders, there are no rangers, there are, the recon, the Marine recon are still on their way to the country, the opportunity falls to the only unit that's there, and that's a detachment of UDT frogmen. And they figured out. They start going ashore, and they start, They find these railways and they try to blow them up with the, well, the one thing that the UDT has is a ton of explosives.

We got some bombs. They got some bombs. I mean, I think the first raid that they actually undertake is in Yosu and spy George Acheson, who is a relatively new frogman. He's not, he wasn't a frogman in World War II. but he's a he he he's become a really good problem solver in his you know four-year career in the UDTs he's one of the one of the first guys to participate in what's called the subops platoon he he's he started to instead of being just the the the frogman who's swimming on the

surface he's he's perfected lockouts from submarines he's driven underwater submersibles so he He might not be a raider or might not be somebody who's trained in inland demolition raids, but he is somebody who's adaptable. And he leads one of the first raids ashore to blow up a railway. And those subsequent guys that come in, fielding, Boynton, they only take the UDTs even further. I'm going to take it to the book on that one. Below the seawall and out of Atchinson's view, Foley had likewise heard the handcart and was already splashing into the surf his legs and arms straining against the slow motion of sucking water

and the bad dream unfolding behind him when he reached the rubber boat he gave a hushed alarm to the crew grabbed the tommy gun and splash back through the surf swimmers lymey austin and mccormick waiting uh waiting behind to keep up under the bridge hatchetson held his breath waiting for an opportunity suddenly a shadowy figure breasted the seawall and charged the tunnel fire a machine gun from the hip instinctively both the North Koreans and Atchinson opened fire at the same target apparently just in time to hear the figure yelling hang in there LT I'm coming it was Foley whether not Atchinson realized his mistake the flash of gunfire unfrozen grenade in hand he

pulled the pin and threw it toward the North Koreans then he threw another and another the sequence of explosions all of unknown origin chased the North Koreans back into the tunnel. Glimping his moment, Acheson tore himself from cover and sprinted to the seawall. As soon as he reached the top of the wall, one of the armed swimmers huddled

at the bottom, spotted a human head poking over the lip and made the same mistake Acheson had and stitched the wall with fire. One of the rounds tore a hole in the bill of Atchinson's hat. Half a second later, Acheson identified

himself, you idiots, hold your fire, It's me and poked his head over again, then scraped down the wall and onto the rocks. At the bottom, he found the rest of his men. Having rolled himself away from danger and over the seawall, Foley was now alert, but gritting his teeth, shot through the hand and thigh, a kneecap smashed by his fall. Once they were together, McCormick scooped up Foley in his arms and everyone ran for the surf. that medium that until this mission the UDT had always considered

the furthest limit of their operations so that's it that's the first venture out of the surf zone and onto the land Foley goes home Foley goes to he's the movie the Frogman

comes out a few months later and Foley, who's recently returned from Korea, he goes to the premiere, he's wheeled up in a wheelchair, and he gets to meet Richard Woodmark, who's the star of the show and everything like that. That's pretty cool. That's one of the few things.

That would have been a totally missed episode had I not gone to the UDTCO Museum. That's one of those, like, I'm walking through that thing. I think I know everything. I walk past a picture of Richard Woodmark and Foley. like, damn, dude. They kind of did a good job on the frog, man.

They really did. Yeah, on the frog, yeah, the movie. They catch you some good attitudes, right? You're like, oh, I know these guys. The kind of first opening 10 minutes where you're catching the, the attitude of these UDT guys, you're like, oh, I recognize this attitude. Yep.

I freaking had to hang out with these idiots my whole life. They're pretty cocky. They're just getting after it. They do a good job with that. So then after you say that fielding now and Boynton, they start pushing in and continue to push these operations. Yeah, it doesn't happen right away. So they, I mean, when the Marine recon gets in country, the Marine, they create this unit special operations group or SOG. And it's another one of those sort of entities where the Marines take the front rank of it.

And the UDT take the subordinate role of just being in charge of the explosives. So the Marines are going to go ashore. they're going to, you know, with guns and everything like that, they're going to clear or provide a perimeter for the UDT to come ashore with explosives, set those explosives onto the railways, and then they escape toward it. Now, they have a couple of these that go sideways. A couple of Marines are wounded, badly, once paralyzed. On the last of these raids, a force of frogmen have to paddle back. into shore to rescue their marine comrades. I think eight of them are hanging out in the water

and water up to their necks because they can't swim. The UD's have to, they hand them straps on the boats and they just pull them back out to sea. But that, it doesn't stop there. So this sort of system, the SOG is broken apart not long after. I think they have a three-week operational, you know, lifespan. Wait, the SOG, the Special Operations Group there in Korea, has a three-week operational career? Yeah, it takes it from all the way up to September right when the Inchon invasion happens.

After Inchon, you know, the imperative to cut the supply lines doesn't exist anymore because we've cut the enemy in half. So once we take Inchon, the North Korean siege of... the Pousson perimeter falls apart. So that's not to say that UDTs are no longer involved in raids for the rest of the war. What I found the point of the whole chapter was less about the UDTs and more about the Navy's preoccupation with partnering with any force that would be able to provide them raiders. So they partner with the, they create SOG. They partner with Korean partisans.

They convince the Army to release the Royal Marine Commandos, the 4-1 Commando. They essentially steal the Royal Marines away from the Army. They're supposed to go serve with the Army. Admiral Burke, who's the chief of staff under Turner Joy, he convinces the Army to let him go and creates one undersea rating force attached to the USS Perch. but he also just creates a rating force to partner with his UDT. So at every point, all these entities are, they partner with the U.S. Navy to create coastal raiders. At different points, all these units get plucked away, plucked away, pulled away for various reasons.

But the Navy sort of in telegraphing its interest, its intent, its desire for its own rating force, As soon as these groups are pulled away, they partner with another one, partner with this one. At every point. And always sort of the common denominator in that process are the UDTs. The UDTs never really become like the, they don't become seals. In fact, there are guys like Doug Fane who writes the book Naked Warrior. His position is that the UDT's future is under the water. We're going, I mean, we, he has no interest in inland combat.

And the contemporaneous documents that I found, I mean, several of them are saying that, you know, the several naval officers are writing that UDTs, the UDT chain of command really does not like doing this. We, I mean, the UDTs would much rather stick to the water. They've only done this as an exigency and we shouldn't rely on the UDTs as an inland rating force. we need to create something different. So all the way back in 1953, you can see some reluctance by the UDT, whereas the Navy is sort of pushing the UDT into this because the UDT or the Navy realizes

there's some real strategic potential here and having a force that can do, that can project this raiding power from the sea. One of the other forces that we see surfacing to fill this gap again is talked about in Chapter 8. This is the resurrection of the Army's Rangers and the guerrilla raid that failed to forestall their second death. I'm going to go to the book here.

On November 21, Puckett's, Puckett or Pouquet? Pucket. Rough Pucket. Puckett. On November 21, Puckett's Rangers were loaned to Task Force Dolvin. Two battalions of mostly tanks and reconnaissance troops intended to range ahead of the rest of the division. For a unit whose motto in the last war was, Rangers lead the way.

The promotion from rear guard to skirmishers was an improvement, but still not what had been intended. On November 24th at 2 p.m., machine gun fire forced the Rangers off their tanks and into the scrub. From the Valley 4 Pucket led a daytime attack to Season Hold Hill 224, during which one Ranger was mortally wounded. In the chaos, T.F. Dolvin's tanks fired on Puckett's men, killing two. and wounding six. The next day, during T.F. Dolvin's phase movement north, enemy fire again opened up on the column, this time from behind. Realizing they were suddenly surrounded, the Rangers bundled off the tanks into the middle

of a frozen rice paddy and sprinted uphill 205. Enemy fire wounded three more Rangers and convinced one of Puckett's two platoon commanders to desert the company and hide behind and hide in the Valley Command Post. As darkness fell, the rangers clawed out frozen foxholes amid the hills emaciated pine trees and Puckett scratched down an artillery support plan. His roster numbered 58 souls. At around 10 p.m., the sound of drums, whistles, and bugles rattled the night's silence. A moment later, a cascade of sparks crackled forth from the slope below, followed by the hard thud of the hard thud of. mortars and grenades than a wave of attackers in tan winter padded uniforms the fight

that followed was not one the Rangers had been promised under the ghostly loom of waning red flares the men fought from the lips of foxholes like trench soldiers relying on artillery to splash their slope clean as with rising tides every wave inched closer and eroded a bit more bullets grenades, courage, men. After five hours and five waves, no Ranger had more than a few rounds left. Any man who had not already done so,

fixed his bayonet. Then came the sixth wave. Shot through the chest with shrapnel in his shoulder, Puckett ducked into the bottom of his foxhole, wrapped white knuckles around his radio handset, cupped the receiver close to his mouth, and begged for another salvo of artillery. The response, get in line.

A half second after Puckett's last transmission, two mortar shells exploded next to him, killing his remaining West Point classmate and peppering holes from his feet to his shoulders. When he woke up, he laughed. There was nothing else to do. All around Puckett's men either snake down the hill or fought to the death.

Holy Mary of, God damn this rifle, one Catholic ranger was heard to curse as he wrenched open his frozen bolt. The last report of Wilbur Clinton, one of the U.S. Army's first black rangers, was the unmistakable sound of him roaring in rage as he charged a cluster of enemy troops with an empty rifle.

He was never seen again. Three privates first class nearly made to the valley floor when they were stopped not by the enemy but by the wind that fills their sails of bravery their duty past looters and battlefield executioners the three stalwarts crept over scrub and bodies until they found pocket alive but reeling on his hands and knees as they dragged him away he was heard muttering the same thing over and over i'm a ranger i'm a ranger Months later, McGee would pen a letter to Pucket in the hospital, commending him and the Eighth Army Rangers for carrying forth the fullest interpretation of duty, honor, and country. This personal satisfaction of doing the job concluded McGee is the highest and often the only reward of a soldier.

In the entire letter, McGee betrayed not a trace of bitterness at the Rangers' misuse. of Puckett's 57 men who started the battle on Hill 205, 17 were wounded and 11 killed. Their bodies destined for the same fate as those at Susterna. The enemy was estimated to have numbered around 600, and they were not North Koreans. With some 300,000 troops, China had entered the war. Ralph Puckett was just a, well, not just, but a year ago, two years. years ago. It was awarded the Medal of Honor. His distinguished service cross was upgraded. Upgraded. I've always wondered what happened to the three that rescued him if they were appropriately

honored. That's no small thing to creep back up that hill with the Chinese soldiers. Yeah, that's crazy. And is this the raid that failed to forestall their second death? No, that's not. So this is a that's an example of kind of the Army's misuse of the Rangers. So again, again, yeah, the Eighth Army Rangers are created in-country. They're created by John McGee, who's the central character of this book. He was a prisoner of war. He fought at baton.

He was a prisoner of war for most of World War II. He escapes, and he tries to create a partisan force, fails to do that in World War II. but this is his second chance. And so he is ordered to explore the idea of creating a partisan force at the beginning of the Korean War. He doesn't find an opportunity there for that, but he does establish an idea for the Rangers. At the same time he's doing this, the Army back in the United States, is also getting the idea to reconstitute the Rangers. So there's sort of two parallel things that are happening. One, there's the Eighth Army Rangers that back in the United States,

they're back at Fort Benning. They're recreating the Ranger company model. But nobody really up top is thinking about how to employ these Rangers and one, how to create a command to make sure that the Rangers do Ranger missions. So once these Rangers are created, unfortunately, all of these rangers companies get attached to divisions. Once the divisions have them, they don't really know what to do with them. So they just treat them like regular infantry.

So they've been trained for these behind the lines raids. Only a couple of behind the lines raids happen. So what the only thing that could have really forestalled that second death would have been a raid that showed the potential of these rangers. And the raid that could have done that almost succeeds is the Virginia One raid. which is sort of a combination of McGee's partisan entities and his ranger entities. He creates this ranger-led partisan mission to sneak 25 miles behind enemy lines to an inland mountain tunnel to destroy that tunnel to cut the enemy supply lines. And as you'll find in the book, it's a complete disaster.

And how was the research on that? Did you run into some issues with the research? Yeah, it was a tough one to research. It was a, I knew that this was the raid that, you know, I knew that was, that I wanted to cover, in part because it did so many things. It did so much work for me. It combined, you know, these sort of two wings of the armies, one, their reconstitution of the Rangers, but also the Army's, you know, interest in partisan or guerrilla operations into a single mission.

but I couldn't find a ton on this. I had communicated with a guy who had formerly served with McGee and the Partisan Command who'd written a book on this mission. Ed Evanhoe, I talked to his son, got notes that his dad had used to write his book. I wasn't until I was doing my research for, or research, I came across a POW report for McGee. So McGee had been a POW in World War II, and I knew that one of the members,

the Virginia One Raid, had also been a POW. So knowing these POW reports existed in the archives, I did a FOIA request to see if there was a POW report of similar length for Martin Watson. Now, the POW report that I had for McGee was like two pages long. I anticipated that I'd have a two-page report for Martin Watson as well. After waiting a couple of months, I finally got an email back saying,

yes, we have the report. I was like, great, can you email me the copy of the report? It's like, no, it's in another report. It's about 750 pages long. I was like, well, can you just pull Martin Watson's section out? And he said, no, it's 750 pages. Like, okay, right. Clearly there's a miscommunication here.

I'll get it the next time. I'm in, you know, Maryland. Next time I was in Maryland, I spent a whole day researching something else. I had moved on from the Virginia One raid. I was like, I'm never going to find anything on this. I'm going to have to recalibrate, come up with something else that shows what I'm trying to show. End of the day, I was like, oh, yeah, there's that Martin Watson POW report. So I requested it.

They, you know, wheeled it out in the box. I opened the box. I pull it open. There's this huge binder. And I'm expecting to leave through it and find the Martin Watson. section of this POW report when in fact every single page in the 750 page collection of papers is all about Martin Watson and the Virginia one raid it was it wrote the chapter for me it was everything was there so let me go to the book on Martin Watson because this guy's well he's Martin Watson raised in

Hartford Connecticut's Frog Hollow District by the competing last stripes of an Irish Catholic diocese a German grandmother and local French bullies Martin R. Watson, red-haired, fair-skinned, and small had survived by learning the languages of each group, by building his body until his back was the size of a dinner table and his legs could not fit into store-bought swim trunks and by joining up with a gang of local Irish tufts who were destined for the usual options of East Coast Irish Destiny, law enforcement or crime. with 75 arrests by the time he was 19 the last one requiring seven police officers to detain him

Watson's future would have undoubtedly been the latter if the Japanese had only stayed on their island a member of Darby's first ranger battalion since North Africa and thus a veteran of blazing heat bitter cold three amphibious landings and more than a few mountain top alamos Watson and his Echo Company platoon had been among the few groups to reach Cisterna's outskirts. There, with all hope lost, Watson, at just 21, had volunteered to stay behind to cover his squad's retreat, a sacrifice that resulted in humiliation in the streets of Rome, followed by 15 months at Stalog 2B, situated on the northeastern fringe of the Reich, and known all above, known above all for its cruelties.

Watson had responded to captivity by murdering the camp commandant's German Shepherd and by attempting so many escapes that the guards had nicknamed him the Hace, German for Rabbit. Upon liberation, Watson had vowed that he would never be a prisoner again. It was a promise. His personality was only to keep for just five months. Whereupon he was jailed for 30 days in East Hartford for inciting a riot and resisting arrest Crimes that preceded six more similar episodes Breach of peace assault Intoxicated assault and assault and battery of a police officer

Sorry man this guy's a freaking maniac For the last charge Watson would have faced as much as nine months in jail had he not re-enlisted in the army then volunteered for the Rangers at that interview for the Virginia one mission McGee had seen in Watson a man physically distinct from the others at six feet four 240 pounds a chin haped like a fist hands the size of country hams a reddish-brown Cadillac mustache with ends as sharp as Tomahawks the real difference in Watson however had lain just below his eyebrows a gaze so comfortable and confident that he looked 15 years older than his 27

years suggested there was only one issue imposing experienced eager a preternatural watson had ended World War II with a rank of T5 technician fifth grade essentially a corporal in the five years since he had advanced not a single rank a fact that belied his leadership potential, which was ample, but spoke volumes about his exposure to a military leader's responsibilities from mission planning to command and control. Yeah. Yeah, as you mentioned, he ended up getting captured again. He gets captured again.

He not before he manages to get all three of his Ranger comrades safely evacuated. He winds up. escaping from the mountaintop, you know, Alamo that they fight their way off of. A Navy pilot had crashed, so it's him, a Navy pilot, and six Korean partisans, and they are making their way something like 87 miles to the coast. And they, or not to the coast, two friendly lines. And the Navy pilot gets captured. Most of the Koreans get captured.

Only Watson gets captured, I think, two miles from friendly lines. almost makes it. And the two Koreans that do make it back to friendly lines, they ultimately are discovered that they had only made it back because they agreed to spy for the

North Koreans and they are executed. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. On July 27, 1953, the armistice that effectively ended the Korean War was signed, and within days the Chinese and North Koreans began publishing daily lists of U.S. prisoners of war earmarked for release. For a printing press operator at the New York Times who

received each list directly from the front, this initiated a nightly series of breath-holding paper-clutching searches through line after line of names, not one of them belonging to his son, of whom he had no information for two years, five months, and 26 days. So this is Watson's old man. Yeah. After 32 nights of this routine, and having recently been informed that only one more list of 110 names remained to be published, this father left his co-workers and his post behind and made for the Connecticut shore to be alone. There, hours later, he was found by local police and informed that the North Koreans had, at the last minute, added a 111th name to their final. list a name the local police knew all too well in the 29 months since his capture corporal martin r watson a soldier

no guard or prisoner believed was actually a corporal had set an example for captivity that to this day has never been exceeded 30 days after he was captured for 18 of which he had been starved in a cave to make his 240 pound size somewhat easier to handle Watson and a South Korean comrade had knocked out a guard with a rock and made for the surrounding mountains where they survived for five days

until their pursuers had disabled them by rolling a grenade into their hideout never medically treated except with some shreds of brown paper to cover his wounds Watson had nevertheless escaped again this time by wriggling out of his rope restraints and jumping free of a moving truck as it slowed around a bend

This time he survived a week before inadvertently walking right past a wide-eyed North Korean patrol. For these attempts and one other, plus an attempted suicide with a broken piece of glass, he had been relentlessly beaten with rifle butts and boot heels and periodically starved and almost always isolated, once in an unsheltered hole for 72 days with rations described by the record as sparse. rightly suspected as an OSS spy and saboteur Watson had also been subjected to almost daily interrogation by the North Koreans, the Chinese, even the Russians, who had drilled him on his exposure to the Gestapo in World War II, but especially on the organizations, methods, and tactics of the paratroop unit to which they knew he had belonged. Watson's response to these and other questions have been a mixture of stony silence or intentional contradiction responses that it invariably earned him a switch across the eyes, a pistol barrel across the face, or hours of kneeling with his nose pressed against a wall and a stone on his head. Throughout these deprivations, Watson never lost his bearing nor conviction. once standing during a packed camp lecture by a British speaker from the London Daily Worker

to say that he, quote, didn't know what communism was and didn't care to find out, end quote. Nor did he and his fellow POWs want to listen to this trainer, commie, son of a bitch. For this affront and as his example to other prisoners, he was eventually frog marched before a military tribunal informed of the armistice, then sentenced to death by firing squad. He still didn't talk. In the end, after having been starved from 240 pounds to 120 pounds, his was an example that earned him the final distinction as the second to last UN POW to be released across the Freedom Bridge.

On the other side, he learned that the Rangers he had so steadfastly protected from exposure no longer existed. I have a hard time listening to that part of it as dad still. I found that newspaper article. And I don't think any dad can read that without getting choked up. But not just that. I mean, all 750 pages of that document, it was all there. And you just do your best to compress, compress, compress,

get as much in there as possible. Because nobody else is writing about this guy. you know that you I mean at least I suspected you know this guy's lost to history um well you last time we you were on and we talked about this actually the first time you were on and we talked about this I said that's the next book right like take those 750 pages get it down let's chop it down to you know 500 yes yeah there's there'd be problems to do that but I think what would be the problems because I'll just go and photo photocopy that thing no No, no, it's not that. It's the way that the documents are lined out. It's a each one of

these things or each of that 750 pages, all of these are, most of the things in there are interviews with inmates. Other inmates. Other inmates. And there's no like chronology to them. So what I've done, which is a, I mean, it's kind of a wrap up or like a montage of things. That's the best I could do considering the timeline that I had available to me. But what, What else is not in there? I mean, the entire epitaph for Martin Watson is, you know, what comes after the war. And that's, you know, what comes after the war for so many of these guys. You know, I've talked to, you know, a number of his, you know, family members.

And it's tragedy. I mean, though he survives the war and, you know, he comes back and, I mean, he's honored, you know, he's not sufficiently. I don't think. I mean, if there's anybody in the book that, you know, is a deserving military member of the Medal of Honor, it's Watson. I think he was, he received, right, I know he received a Silver Star for that, which I think is completely insufficient. But what happens after the fact is, you know, he comes back to a wife, comes back and he has children, and he's not capable of managing that. Ultimately, he is, because of his demons, he leaves his family, escapes to Alaska, and works on an oil pipeline for years, only sees his son,

I think two dozen times after he leaves, gets cancer, and dies, I think, when his son is about 12 years old. One of the last memories that his son has of him is in the hospital bed, and he's completely, He shrunk from, you know, this monster of a man that he used to be into, you know, this emaciated figure. And every time his son would come to the hospital to see his dad, his dad, the password that he had to knock, or that he had to give before he came into the hospital room was courage. So, unbelievable detail in here. Although you did mention there's a raid that you've cut from the book. Yeah, the witch on.

On the Wechon Dam, what was that all about? So the Huichon Dam raid is, it's another failed attempt. It's probably the one, if the Virginia one raid wasn't the raid that would have convinced army planners that the Rangers had a purpose to play in this conflict, then it was the Weichon Dam raid. And that was a, it was happening almost at the exact. same time as the Virginia One team was escaping south along the peninsula. But it was not well planned, but it was supposed to be a raid to seize a dam from the North Koreans or from the Chinese that were holding it.

And they had to row across a lake. They had to collect, you know, what little boats that they, Army had, I mean, within 24 hours, they threw this thing together and the Rangers had to paddle secretly across, land on an enemy shore, and then climb up a mountain to try and get around this dam. And in the process of that, they're contacted by sort of a readout, you know, that was positioned well away from the dam. They didn't even get close to the dam.

So before, you know, the morning is even out, they can't retreat, they can't advance, they can't receive supplies. Eventually they are, another force comes and relieves them and rescues them, but the raid itself is a disaster. It's not until later that the dam is actually pummeled by Navy fighter bombers that the raid is dismantled or taken. But that was the one raid, I thought, you know, if I couldn't do the Virginia one raid, And I couldn't show how the Army, you know, had turned its back again on this raider concept,

and it would have been the way John damn raid. It's, you know, equally, you know, dramatic and it's equally important. It's just one of those things. You have to make a choice as, you know, as a historian. What are you going to focus on? You've got to, you know, keep moving your reader into the next, you know, you don't want to just jam them up in Korea. You've got to keep moving forward.

And so ultimately, we end up leaving the Korean War, with still no real commando unit. Correct. And moving in past the Korean War into Chapter 9, Arly Burke, the Bay of Pigs, and the launching of the Navy's limited war seals. And I'm going to the book on this. Proposed as separate and distinct from the fleet's UDTs,

the recruits for the new, for the two new seals. teams one on each coast would like Adam's rib be drawn from them ten officers and 50 enlisted men per team all graduates of the training first conceived for the scouts and raiders then modified by Kaufman for the NCDUs the specialized training needed to create the seals said the memo would occur at existing army and navy schools or could be added to the present UDT curriculum as required. Before long, rumors of a naval commando unit began to hover so thickly above the UDTs that many

took the clouds for smoke of their own making. It would require another six months of CNO-level conversations, meetings, and memoranda to allocate funding, to carve out basing, to hammer out organizational plans and chains of command to purchase commercial watercraft and fund new research for silent motors to resurrect six mothballed APDs from retirement to study the country of south vietnam and there to embark on a type of riverine warfare said one memo that the navy had not seriously attacked since the war between the states and at the end of that six months the navy would quietly without any ceremony commission seal team one on Coronado Island

and San Diego and seal team two at Little Creek in Virginia Beach. So this is, we're starting to get to that culminating point. Yeah, they I mean the I mean you touch on the

controversy there. There's this whole period after the sealed teams are created where guys start coming out of the wood work to say, this was my idea. I did this. I'm the one that wrote the memo. All right, let's see it. Let's see the memo. You know, Roy Bollum, who was, he wrote an entire book called The First Seal. I mean, he makes the case that it was him that put this thing together. And he based, you know,

his idea, in part off of Mary Miles' book, a different kind of war. A different kind of war didn't come out for five years after when the seal teams are created. Oh. So to use Mary Miles is like his book is the, anyway. But yeah, I mean, there's a. Oops. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, it's this whole thing that none of this would have happened without, like we talked about in the last episode, not without the effort, without the foresight of Burke. and there were lots of folks in the UDTs that they had no interest in going in this direction. There were some that did. I mean, there was a contingent of folks, and like I talked about, Fielding, Boynton, Adjison, there were guys that had experienced those raids in the Korean War, and they knew that there was something more that they could be doing. But I don't think anybody in the UDTs was proposing this, this force, this go-anywhere force.

And the idea that this would be a go anywhere force, it's there in the original name. I mean, nobody had really thought that, you know, they were going to be creating this capture kill commando force. But they had thought of that go anywhere capability. And that's there from the beginning, that sea, air, and land capability. And that was all derived from this series of committees

and, you know, memoranda. meetings that Burke had convened with his senior staffers, and they had pulled that from all the ideas that they've been collecting from the fleet. They've been interviewing and talking and having people write white papers and just develop ideas. I mean, the one genius of Burke is that he realizes he's not a genius.

He's pulling ideas from every place he can possibly get them. So when these guys say that it was my idea, I'm not necessarily so confident that they didn't send these memorandums. We just don't have them. We don't, I mean, there's only one person who's responsible for that, you know, final establishment. That's him. Him, Burke.

The strange thing about this is, you know, when you say, well, there's a lot of UDT guys that were sort of like, hey, we don't want to do that. And if you were to ask probably the entire time that I was in the SEAL teams up until today, the percentage of people that if you gave them the choice of what type of operation they wanted to conduct. Yeah, right. I know.

You know where I'm going with this, right? This is the puzzle. Like, everyone would say, hey, we want to be on land. We want to push another land. We want to push into the hinterland. We want to. Is it cool to come over the beach? Hell, yeah, it is.

It's awesome. But we want to go over the beach. We want to get from the water to the land. that's where the cool things are happening. It's interesting to think that it's interesting to think that you would back in the day, like if it wasn't for the SEAL teams, if I didn't see pictures of freaking guys dressed up like commandos with machine guns in Vietnam, I never would have joined the Navy, ever, not in a million years.

If you had only seen a picture of a guy in swim trunks with a dive knife. Yeah. I mean, yeah, it was that as... Yeah, what is that? What are you doing? I don't know. But the thing is, like, everybody who, you know, joined the SEAL teams in that era,

that's what they were joining for. They weren't joining because of the SEAL teams. Nobody knew what the SEAL teams were. It wasn't until, you know, they got there and they were like, oh, there's this other thing? Yeah. Like Mike Thornton, Tommy Norris, Pete Peterson, Bob Gallagher. They didn't join the SEAL teams.

They joined the UDTs. They joined to be UDTs. Yeah. And, you know, regardless, they created this institution. The other thing that's interesting about this is, When you think about the senior leadership in the in the Navy including Burke being on a ship off the coast unless you're in World War II and you're getting attacked by Coma Koso's being in a ship off the coast of combat is is totally it's a world away if you're in a ship off the coast of a combat zone you are a world away from combat

Like I said unless you're in World War II and there's freaking common cause he's coming at you. God bless you But if you're not in World War II or whatever this next war is going to be or whatever this next war is going to be possibly Yeah, you're you're you're in a different scenario so it's interesting to think that That the that the senior leadership thought let us get involved in that let us the Navy get involved in that stuff over there over the horizon, onto the land, where there's bullets and bad guys and snakes, right? You would think part of the Navy would say, hey, look, that's not really our business.

That's not our thing. We're staying our lane over here. We'll get you to the beach. You take it from there. So if it wasn't for this void that the Navy had seen over and over and over again, where they couldn't get someone to do what we needed them to do, the Navy couldn't get commandos to do what they needed commandos to do, anybody could have stepped into this role.

Anybody could have. And when I look back and, you know, you can almost use the example of aviation as a counter to my, you know, whole thesis. You could say, like, well, you know, just because, you know, the Army and the Marine Corps had failed to do this, doesn't mean the Navy wouldn't have, you know, done this as well. I mean, you could have had the Rangers. You could have had the green berets. You could have had all these entities. And the Navy still would have created the SEAL teams.

And I say that's, I don't think so. And the reason I think that that's wrong is because of all these episodes of the Navy attempting to partner time and time again. Like the Navy is constantly saying, we will support you. We will just let us partner with something. Stop, you know, taking this away from us. Because all through the Korean War, all through World War II, you know, the Navy is sponsored. various commando units. So I don't, I mean, I think that argument,

it's not an argument that's been made back to me, but it was always an argument that I was thinking about when I was writing this book, like to confirm, you know, to sort of, you know, means test my own thesis. Like, none of this would have happened without that neglect, but it also would not have happened without that, without that mentality that Burke had. So it was a combination of two things, you know,

It was, yes, it was the neglect of the Army and the Marine Corps, but also, you know, not just neglect, it didn't just create that space. It was also, you know, you have this person who's, you know, this person of Burke who, you know, can't stomach a Navy that is not connected to combat. And if those two things hadn't collided, there would not be a SEAL team. Here's a hypothesis. And I don't know how this is going to land, but I'm taking a shot at it. The water, the water sucks for operations.

It completely sucks for operations. It ruined your weapons. It ruins your radios. It makes you cold. It can kill you. The water absolutely sucks for operations. And throughout all of these opportunities for all these other units to say, hey, we got this, it seems like at least it might have been a little bit of a factor,

just a little tiny bit of a factor for everybody. When the big Navy says, hey, we need somebody that can stay in the water and also go up on that. Everyone goes, hey, we'll just take the land part over here. We'll give it a try, but then damn, that sucked. We were freezing. Our weapons didn't work. We lost two guys that drown, right? That's what happens.

And there's no enemy there. Yeah. What do we want us to do back there? I mean, yeah, there's some things that maybe you want us to blow up from time to time. And, you know, you may want us to figure out how deep the water here is. But, you know, the, I mean, a lot of us just, you know, the, you know, like that, you know, the whole gap of the admirals or the revolt of the admirals. I mean, they want to prove they're relevant. Everybody wants to be relevant.

And institutions are just collections of people. And, you know, institutions are going to. Make themselves relevant whether it's in the market or with government agencies. I mean, we're gonna find Opportunities or you're gonna if there are no opportunities, you're gonna make them and You're not I mean everybody wants to earn their paycheck and feel like they've done something I mean if there's nothing to do well, you're gonna find it. Yeah, we're gonna find something You talked about Burke's CNO ceremony a little bit when we kick this thing off. I mean Were you going to?

Yeah. What else were you going to say about that? The whole chapter had started. I found, I actually found, Burke's CNO ceremony on YouTube. I don't know how many times I watched it. I mean, I don't know, like, I don't know how many.

This is when he became CNO? Yeah. There's a, that's on YouTube? That's on YouTube. Damn. And I mean, I think there's, you know, 500 views. I'm responsible for 485.

How long is it? It's like, well, I mean, They compress it. It's like a, and I think there's a couple of different versions of it, but maybe 30 minutes. Okay. But there's different speakers and everything, and I'm watching this thing, like time after time. I remember watching this thing, like, you know, in the middle of the night, like, you know, I'm not doing anything bad. I'm watching, I'm watching 50-year-old Navy C&O.

Did he give a powerful speech or something? No, his speech is terrible. He's not a good speaker. He's sort of choppy. There's a couple of other speakers that get up in the process that are actually, that are better than him. So why are you so hyped on this thing that you watched it 499 times? You know, I think a lot of it was just because, I mean, some of the things that are said, you know, they're talking about this, you know, this revolution that's undergoing with naval warfare

that's about to, you know, undergo with naval warfare. And when Burke gets up, he articulates sort of, you know, his ideas. And, you know, so many of his ideas are, you know, the navies, at the, the Navy's at the, cusp of this technological revolution. And so when Burke comes into office, any person who listened to that speech would think, all right, well, the Navy is going to evolve. They're going to go deeper. They're going to go further up. They're going to start taking advantage of nuclear weapons. It's going to be a technological revolution in the Navy. And that's where it will stop. But that's not what happens. Burks...

Burke's interest, Burke's emphasis does not stop. Yes, he modernizes the fleet. He puts nuclear weapons on submarines. He stretches the Navy's reach from, you know, the bottom of the ocean to the edge of the atmosphere. But in between that gap, he also does a lot of things. I think the most consequential is the establishment of this unit. You wouldn't have predicted that or you would not have seen, you know, he would not have, you know, conveyed any plans like that in that presentation, so, or that

initial speech. So I was watching it not just for what was said, but for what was not said. How much credit are you given to Kennedy in this whole gig? So Kennedy, so there's a lot of, you know, old frogmen that you meet, who, they still think that the SEAL teams would not exist without Kennedy. it's a really apparently compelling, you know, myth. I don't know why because, you know, Kennedy dies in November of 63. The SEAL teams are established in January of 62. And if there's anything that we learn, you know, in the preceding chapters of this book,

is that, you know, all of these units, you know, they could have been, you know, killed in the crib. You know, they could have strangled to death in infancy or smothered, you know, by a pillow is how I describe it. Like all of these units could have been, you know, disbanded. I mean, the SEAL teams are only two years old at the time of Kennedy's death. So even if Kennedy had been responsible, and I don't think he is because all of the committees that Burke has convened before Kennedy's even elected, you know, they proceed, you know, they proceed his election. They're already mentioning, you know, the word seal before Kennedy's elected. They have these plans already in place. Kennedy's supportive of them, but he's not the, he's a single. not the reason that they're put into place.

Yeah, some of Kennedy's speeches, you know, he's talking about unconventional warfare. He's talking about all these commando type things. And he wants everybody to get involved in this. He does. But the Navy was, the Navy's already forward-leaning into this. I mean, the Army, too, the Army. I mean, and when Kennedy comes in, you know, his, you know, he has a love affair with the concept of, you know, counterinsurgency. and his favorite unit of all time,

which is the Army Special Forces. Yeah, I think I've read a speech of his at West Point. Actually, I've read it on this podcast because it's sort of how it indicates so much the whole idea of the special forces and special operations and how big it's going to be for him. What about going, as you're trying to research the Bay of Pigs, you know, you've got the CIA.

Was there, how available is information about that? It's a black hole. To this day, huh? To this day, I don't know how many requests I made at the CIA's archives for information. I would find, you know, a thing here or there, but not very much. There, I was able to find several of the frogmen that participated in the Bay of Pigs. I was writing up until the final days before the publisher literally, you know, ripped the book out of my hands. I was talking to Korean frogmen or Cuban frogman.

And, you know, found one. I couldn't believe I found him. Interviewed him. And then he gave, you know, me a number for another guy. Couldn't believe, you know, he did. And I talked to him, gave me a number for another one. Before I knew it, I was talking to all these guys. I was like, oh, my gosh, this is incredible.

Never expected, you know, to find any of these, you know, covert operatives. But, you know, here they are. and they wanted to tell their story. So it was pretty cool. Awesome. So we get through that time. Anything else you want to cover in that chapter? I mean, you could, no, I think, Grace and Lynch and Rip Robertson.

I mean, these are. And these are guys that you cut? I didn't cut them. They're in the book. I mean, they could be their own, yeah, they could be their own books. I mean, they're both, you know, they're both the CIA, you know, not. case officers, they're the paramilitary officers that are leading, not just the reconnaissance, not just the Cuban frogmen or the raid that the Cuban frogmen do, but they're also, you know,

running the entire mission. They're back on ships, you know, relaying information, doing everything they can to support the invasion. They're held, you know, back. And then when the the brigade forces collapse, both Robertson and Lynch, they spend two weeks sleeping almost not at all, doing everything they can to rescue as many brigade survivors as they can. So when they finally do get pulled, or when they finally do get pulled, and the Navy is supporting that entire effort, the Navy doesn't support the initial raid almost at all, despite Burke's repeated protests and his repeated attempts to get Kennedy to let the Navy intervene, but the Navy does not abandon the Cuban brigade members.

Night after night the Navy is sending whaleboats ashore do anything they can to rescue survivors. And the most compelling characters in the whole testimony that Robert Kennedy convenes in the aftermath of these two guys, and they show back up to testify in front of this committee. They're completely sunburned black almost. They show up in boots that are crusted white with salt water. I mean, they're pretty convincing. And Grayston Lynch, you know, he goes to his grave, you know, hating anything, you know, remotely related to Kennedy.

He goes on to another career. He was at Omaha Beach. He was at Omaha Beach. He became a green beret. He joins the CIA. I think he ends his government service with the DEA. He starts the DEA. You believe it.

That brings us up to chapter 10, which is titled Kennedy's Army of Gladiators and the counterinsurgency that blunted their swords, then cleared the way for another contender. Echo's getting a kick out of that one. And you know, you talk about it. the fact that this was a really hard chapter chapter for you to write and you this is this is the and it makes sense that it's hard to write because you've got the special forces yeah which

by all means look if the Marine Corps isn't going to make some kind of a maritime special operations go anywhere forced then if the if the Marine Corps is not going to do that then certainly the Army special forces should become this capability. And it's a very bizarre, I think bizarre is a strong word, it's a very interesting thing that drives them in a different direction. Right. Yeah, I mean, it's totally unpredictable. I mean, they create them in 1952, sort of right after the failure of the Virginia One

raid, but they see the potential of partisans or they see the potential of guerrilla forces. I mean, the one disadvantage that the West has compared to the communist forces of the Soviet Union are, you know, we don't have as many men. We just don't have the manpower. So, or at least in the military, we don't. So our idea or the idea of special forces is to be able to, you know, parachute, you know, behind enemy lines and raise a guerrilla force to raid the enemy's vulnerable spaces. The problem that they discover in this period between 1952 and 1962 is that the Soviet Union is not like other countries. It's not like the West. If you want to create a partisan force in central Colorado, you might be able to do it.

You might be able to find some wing nuts out there and raise a militia and go attack oil plants or whatever. You could probably do that because we have an open society. That does happen. Yeah, right. But you know, you can't do that in. In a Gestapo state or a Soviet Union because they know they've got identity cards on everybody. I mean, you can't. There's just not the infrastructure to be able to do that.

So the special forces, you know, this idea that you're going to have behind the lines raiders made up of indigenous forces. It's ridiculous. So they sense that. They know that. And they start to, you know, evolve themselves. They transform themselves into a. completely sort of different unit, which Kennedy finds out about.

Or sort of, you know, these two things are sort of happening at the same time. Kennedy is discovering this concept of counterinsurgency and the winning of hearts and minds and the least, if not the creation of American freedom fighters, at least denying tribesmen and indigenous peoples to the Soviets. So why don't we support these people? why don't we, you know, give them weapons? Why don't we train them out of fight? And it becomes, you know, the perfect, you know, marriage of a capability and an opportunity.

Counterinsurgency and the special forces. So they're married together. And that leads us into Vietnam. Yeah, the transition, these guys started off. Where they started, you know, in the early 1950s. It looks like they could end up just be in a good commando force or a straight-up commander force. Absolutely. I mean, I'm going to the book here.

You say established in 1952, the special forces had been intended to replicate the experiences of its founder and first commander, former OSS, operative Colonel Aaron Bank in 1944, as a 41-year-old Jedberg. He had dropped into France, led resistance fighters. Then in 1945, as impromples at sounds, had almost led an operational group. of German POWs into the Alps on a mission to capture Hitler. Hell yeah. Guided by these examples, Bank and his successors had erected an organization to match their mission. 2,000 airborne qualified soldiers spread across three forward-staged battalion-sized groups, one in Okinawa, one in Germany, one in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Already at a moment's notice to drop into an enemy country and lead a ready band of resistance fighters to physically create these groups, Groups, a special warfare center had been hacked out of a remote corner of Fort Bragg in the mid-1950s, and volunteers had been recruited.

Plenty of former Rangers, old jockstrap-type commandos, no first enlistments or second lieutenants permitted to apply, and ushered through a three-month course in guerrilla warfare with a staggering 90% dropout rate. This was followed by language instruction and individual courses in one of four specialties, weapons, demolition, radio communications, and longest of all, medicine. The pipeline culminated with a multi-week exercise in which candidates infiltrated a notional enemy country, linked up with a band of dissidents, which were other candidates, sent up a hinterland base camp, imparted their individual specialties, and it led their guerrillas on a series of raids and ambushes, all while avoiding an aggressor force of local deputies, national guardsmen, and state police.

There you go, man. that's special forces. I mean, that's, what is it, Robin Sage? It's Robin Sage, yeah. And they still have it, and they, you know, still the idea is that you're going to be able to lead or find these groups. I think that's the, that's the trick is how do you find these groups in, you know, Soviet societies or societies where, you know, you have an aggressive, you know, Gestapo-type police force. You don't have a free society. And the only place that you're going to find, you know, a ready pool of candidates to, you know, join a thing like this is in, you know, sort of ungoverned spaces where there aren't, you know, these, you know, state police or secret police.

What's the deal with Yarbrough's daughter? Oh, it's one of the, you know, things that I was, so Yarbrow, he's the, it was tough to find the. it was tough to find the character in this. I always try to, you know, when I was working on a chapter, working on a different unit, I was always trying to find, you know, one, you know, the operation that was, you know, most consequential to driving, you know, that mission's either success or failure, their continuation, their disbandment.

But then once I found the operation or the program or something, I was always trying to find the character that was most important to that mission's success or failure. And Yarborough, this chapter is distinct in one way. It's not, there's no operation. I'm covering lots of little mini battles. I mean, war is changing at this point. So, you know, the sort of the chapter structure that I had settled on in World War II and the Korean War, you know, where I focus on one main operation. It's kind of gone at this point in the book because, you know, there's no one, there's so many battles that are occurring, or so many little small skirmishes.

But, you know, I focus on Yarborough because he's the person who, he creates the special warfare center or the schoolhouse for Green Berets and marries, you know, the Green Berets to this new operation of counterinsurgency. So there's no more commando operations for the special forces, no raiding or anything like that. It's only coin or counterinsurgency. urgency. So he's training guys not to just, you know, lead ambushes and things like that, but he's teaching his guys to dig wells and, you know, animal husbandry and how do you, how do you convince,

you know, tribal people, you know, to join your group. You have to, you know, you've got to do med checks. You've got to do all the sorts of things that nobody really likes to do. But in the course of him, you know, overhauling the Special Warfare Center and in the course of him preparing to showcase this to Kennedy for Kennedy's visit to Fort Bragg. His daughter, who's about to get married to another Green Beret officer, she's in a terrible car accident and dies. She's killed. And Yarborough is a month away from, you know, his, you know, career-making presidential visit. This is going to, you know, this visit is going to either make or break the special force. is everything and he's worked for.

And in that period, he, like I write in the book, he cinches down his grief and he gets back to work. The first thing he does, and I managed to talk to, I interviewed Yarbrough's daughter's fiancé. He never married after she was killed. But he said the first thing that he did, and he talked to the general several times after his fiancé was killed.

But the first thing that Y'Irault, Yarbrough did after his wife died is the same day he went through the house and he took down every picture of her. You mean after his daughter died? After his daughter died, he went through the house. Yarbrough did and he took down every picture. Got rid of every trace of her. Couldn't handle the grief. He just shut it down. And then he spent the next month doing everything he could, he poured himself into getting ready for that presentation. and Yarborough drove the special forces as you just said into not being a commando force but being a counterinsurgency force right which creates another gap which which leaves the gap the gap remains the gap remains now we end up with chapter 11 the first seals their search for a mission and the report that found it for them the

Bucklew report. What's going on? So in 1964, the Navy, the Navy seeing that there is trouble in Southeast Asia and wants to contribute but does not know how. The Navy is run by traditional blue water sailors, as it always is, and is trying to figure out how to contribute to this, you know, conflict. and they gather together seven naval officers, led by a blue water sailor, Admiral Savage. They send this survey team to Vietnam to get a lay of the land and figure out how the Navy can contribute. The group itself is comprised of a lot of the Navy's kind of unconventional thinkers,

David Del Judas, who is the first commanding officer of SEAL Team 1, he's there. He's sort of acting as a contributor slash admiral's aide. There's a former UDT officer, a Silver Star winner, and there's Phil Bucklew and several others who have spent considerable time in Vietnam. So Phil Bucklew at this point is he's a captain or an 06. He's the second in command. they're there for less than a week when Admiral Savage has a, I'm not sure, the record is unclear, he has either a heart episode or he gets into an alcohol-related incident and is forced to retire

back to the states. Regardless, it leaves Phil Bucklew in charge of the survey team. Now, what would have happened if Admiral Savage had remained in his position as the survey leader, I don't know, but what we do know is what did happen. And that's Phil Bucklew, who is the most forward-leaning or, you know, the person who's still in the military who has experienced every unconventional phase of the Navy's sort of inland adventurism. He's now in charge of this survey team. They spend six weeks, you know, going around the entire country. They go to special forces camps.

They travel up the Mekong River. They examine where supplies are coming in, if they are, as the Navy is contending, or as the Navy argues, that they're being sailed down around the coast and infiltrated along the ocean coast. And what they figure out is that none of that is happening. None of the Navy's claims are true.

all of the contraband, all the weapons that are being funneled to the insurgency are coming right down that Mekong River and they're being injected throughout the country through various waterways. He discovers this and says we are not going to have an impact if the Navy doesn't leave the blue water and starts doing what the fleet did in the American Civil War and that's hitting the brown water rivers. and in the report, you know, he makes a point to say that, you know, there's lots of opportunities for raiding along these rivers. He only mentions the Seals once, never really connects them to that idea of rating. But he does, you know, say explicitly in the report,

the Navy should be in charge of that inland raiding mission. and when the report's delivered, it's sort of, in the whole process of this, like everybody's trying to get a hold of his report before he publishes it, before he takes it back to the Navy. Paul Harkins, who's in charge of MacVee at the time, his deputy, William Westmoreland. They're all trying, they're having lunch with him. Henry Cabot Lodge is the ambassador to Vietnam.

Everybody's trying to get a look at Phil Buckley's report. report. Phil Buckley, to his credit, he does not want to let this thing out of his hands until he has a chance to let his Navy superior see it first. It's, you know, it's still controversial. Like, you know, the Navy, like I said, the Navy hadn't been involved in a war like that for over, for over 100 years. So you're saying it's controversial because of that? It's controversial because he's advocating for, you know, this, this, this, this, this force that's going to take us away from the blue water, away from, you know, the Navy's emphasis at that point, which is aircraft and aircraft carriers and nuclear subs and everything like that.

You're putting us back in the weeds. But having been, you know, a veteran of the scouts and raiders, and then a veteran of Sacco, and then a in charge of the Navy's relationship with the CIA, during the Korean War and all the various CIA raids with the UDTs in the Korean War. I mean, he's positioned. I mean, he's taking his biography and he's saying, well, why shouldn't we be doing this? I've experienced two wars where we've done this already. We absolutely should be trying to support this effort as much as possible. If the government or if the country has decided that this is worth American lives,

then it should be a mission worth Navy life. as well. And he delivers that report to just... The General Feld. And the commander-in-chief of the Pacific Fleet. They're head over heels in love with this thing. No, they're not head-over-heel. They, they, this report gets passed back and forth. I mean, it becomes, like I said in the book, it becomes a bit of a hot potato.

Where does it get traction? It all, I'm not sure where it ultimately gets traction because it takes two years for really the Navy to, you know, put this thing into effect before they feel, you know, the Navy River Reen Force or CTF 116 combined task force 116. Was there a champion for it above Phil H. Bucklew? Not that I could find. Interesting. But everybody, if I had to guess, I would guess it was probably somebody like Norville,

Norville Ward who becomes more important later. But I'm not sure. I didn't find them. One other part of this chapter that I wanted to run through, because it's, pretty freaking awesome is this uh at some point the navy sends down some some uh like academics and some some psychologists and so so I got to read this part when the Navy's academics had arrived in 1955 to observe UDT training their purpose had been to validate the course's individual selection tests the soft sand runs the ocean

swims, the harassments of Hell Week, and short of invalidating any of these, to develop what they called realistic selection standards that would reduce what the Navy admitted was the course's excessive attrition. Subjecting students to a battery of personality tests and classifying their individual traits, age, education, intelligence, and so on, the academics hoped not only to predict the candidate's likelihood of success in training, but also his success in an actual underwater demolition team. In the course of these assessments, they learned that the students below the age of 21 were 8% more likely to fail, roughly the same rate as high school dropouts. While students from broken homes were

just as likely to graduate as anyone else, based on the number of times a student had volunteered to visit the dispensary, which is medical, assessors determined that that a candidate in moderate health who minimized the psychological importance of pain, fatigue, and intense discomfort stood a much higher chance of success than, quote, the most physically fit who were over-concerned about their injuries. So you're better off just being a tough son of a bitch that maybe can't run too quick, but I don't care of my knee hurts. I'm going to keep going.

the least common traits among successful frogmen seem to be restraint, thoughtfulness, sociability, and cautiousness. The most common were responsibility, emotional stability, original thinking, objectivity, and most of all, masculinity. So, you know, as I read through that, I mean, it just, You just picture every team guy that you know and you know where the bell curve is. And yeah.

I mean, I knew that this had to get in the book. I bounced it around from section to section because I had about 15 years to play with. I finally found a home for it here. And I was really happy that I did. There's lots of these little assessments that they had put together over the years and they were trying to understand.

And they still try and understand, by the way. They still do. And they still have no idea. No idea. That's why it's so great because it's just, I mean, this is a report done in 1955. We're still at this. We still have no, like. The Navy still says, hey, why can't you figure out who's going to make it?

Why is your attrition rate so high? They still say, I mean, the attrition rate right now is insane. It buds. It's insane. Like 10, 15% are making it through. It continues on. Later studies had gone on to test a variety of variables, including the benefits of wheat, in a student's diet, which proved predictably negligible, and a series of Rorschach tests and

psychiatric interviews to determine the effect of sexuality on a candidate's success or failure. Successful Frogmen, said the sex report's author, appeared to require this specific, rather masculine, and adventurous occupation with all of its self-destructive and masochistic implications because, and this was just the author's speculation of their magical attraction to the depth of the sea and the security of the womb and an unconscious motivation to prove their masculinity coupled with a fear of involvement with women. Setting aside the psychoanalyst's tendency to project their own insecurities onto their subjects, the Navy had not been able to argue with the UDT's results.

That was not the worst, dig. I got one in there. I have never met a group of more self-reliant, hell for leather characters, wrote reporter Bill Stapleton after accompanying a UDT to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in 1955. Besides their typical reconnaissance exercises, submarine lockouts, and test with miniature submersibles, the frogmen had also salvaged a 50-foot yacht from a reef, twisted the tail. of passing sharks and when an American sailor had disappeared into the harbor on a moonless night had commandeered a truck roared to the wharf's edge and as if they'd been scouting the contours of an enemy beach dove online until they found the drowned man in their free time they spearfished drank untold amounts of beer erected

beachside bonfires and an overflowing pots of seawater and vinegar boiled lobsters and astonished the superstitious natives by broiling barracuda steaks. You eat barracuda, barracuda eat you, they had said. Promises, replied a frog man, nothing but promises. So exclusive were the UDTs, said one observer, that even rank met nothing to them. When seen in their standard swim trunks and belt knives, surrounded by charts and diving equipment, and asked by passer-by if they were indeed in the Navy, the frogmen would invariably reply,

regardless of the askers rank, nope, we're all in UDT. So there you go. I went to St. Thomas one time. Did you? Yeah, and it sounds about like this. We rented a room. So we were doing training in Puerto Rico, and I think we got,

We got a little, we chartered a plane. And bro, this is like 1990, whatever. I mean, this is not when people are chartering planes. I don't know who pulled this together. We charter a plane. We go to St. Thomas. We get there. That place is beautiful, by the way.

But we went, we've got an 18-man. We were an ARG platoon. We've got an 18-man platoon. So I'm pretty sure everyone went, but most of us went. We got a bunch of guys. Most of the platoon. We rent one hotel room for everyone to stay in because, you know, we're all cheap. And besides, who's planning on sleeping when we're going to be?

Long story short, when I get back to the hotel room at seven or eight o'clock in the morning on Saturday morning, all these guys are asleep. And I remember there was someone that had pulled because there was air conditioning in the little hotel we were saying. So two guys had pulled the curtains off. like rip the curtains off the curtain rods, and we're rolled up in the curtain rods, like blankets on the floor, like a bunch of just savages.

So really not that much has changed. The young UDT spirit survives. And meanwhile, this report that you talked about is circulating, and now we're starting to get some traction and starting to figure out what's going on chapter 12 chapter 12 which is called the damn break of conventional war in

vietnam and the following flood of raiders that failed to beat the navy to the make on delta all but one that's impressive right now go yeah let me get into this one a little bit the CIA had already discovered there were challenges at attempting to break a wild herd of mustangs these or Vietnamese soldiers that they're trying to train into wearing a war chariots yoke. The CIA's initial solution to this Mustang breaking was, as usual, to outsource the job to the U.S. military's trainers and advisors. In this case, however, the CIA's planners did not offer the job to their standby pool of Special Forces A teams, but instead took a long shot chance on a three-man element from

SEAL Team 1. A gamble due to the elements leader, a man who had convinced the CIA planners that he was the equivalent of an entire special forces a team. He almost was. With a boxer's jab that could part the Red Sea, said one who saw it, and a six-foot three-inch frame that could have weighted through it, it had been natural to assume that storekeeper first class Robert Wagner's most likely contribution to the seal teams would have been in pure pugilistic combat.

His instincts for it were undeniable. driving a Jeep through a MACV compound and passing so close to an army sergeant that the offended man had taken a swing at Wagner's lieutenant. In the passenger seat, Wagner had responded by slamming on the brakes, then beating the sergeant so savagely that the lieutenant had feared for the man's life. I never saw anything like that, the lieutenant said later. Not an uncommon expression whenever Wagner was around. As one of the only enlisted UDT are graduates of that period to be selected to skip the mandatory stint in UDT for a direct assignment to a seal team, Bob Wagner, despite a wife and four young children, had predictably risen to become one of the team's most eager volunteers for repeat deployments to the Ben High and LDNN three six-month tours in three years. in his role he had earned a reputation among superiors that had swung between the superlatives of perfectionist advisor and perfect seal

reputations he had cultivated while simultaneously building a name as a wheeler dealer for his part ownership of a beachside bar in denang called the blue moon clean cut for a seal even by 1960 standards his face a graph of hard angles and straight lines below a flat top deliberately raked to attention. His only physical feature that suggested he was anything more than a lockstep conventional were his eyes, hard, focused, a bit like a predator in pursuit of its prey and implying a similar pace. Dude, you're a good freaking writer, man.

I mean, that's just an awesome, an awesome little section there. So we got the Mac V-Sog, we got Force Recon going on. We got the LERPs. We got the PRUs. Yeah, it's a tough one. This is a tough, it's a tough period to cover because all this stuff is happening all simultaneously. This is the one chapter that sort of stands alone in all my chapters. They don't focus on one person.

I focus on, you know, four distinct units, probably the most important being the one you just read Bob Wagner, who is. he is he's a tough character to to compress and to you know it's it's difficult you know to you know highlight seals that were you know standouts or I mean it's a it's a it's a standout group already I mean the you know the guys that are selected from UDT to come to the SEAL teams they're the they're the best guys in UDT and then to you know you know figure out who the best guys and the SEAL teams were at this point is also difficult. But then when you look at somebody like Wagner,

who kind of stands above everybody, you know, in his, one, his foresight, but his ability to, you know, use everything, all the tools that he has and his personality, everything from straight force. I mean, he, in the course of his creation of the PRU camp, lots of different entities come in to try and steal this from him. And he uses a variety of ways to keep them out. One, he just threatens to kick their ass.

Two, he, you know, like I say in the book, he threatens just, you know, pack up his bags and go home, which, you know, convinces the CIA planners to push everybody else aside. So, I mean, he's, but, you know, all while he's doing that while he's building this program that nobody else is building, and he's just, I mean, he's running,

from place to place to place. He's participating in missions. He's conducting rifle range training himself. He's managing his own bar. He, you know, he doesn't, I mean, he created the one bar, the Blue Moon and the Nang, but he also creates a separate bar down. He's like franchise and liquor places. I mean, he's like, in some sense, he's the, you know, he's the, the, the 1966 version

of Jocco. He's just, I mean, he's completely, but he's, uh, And, you know, the whole time he's got, you know, family with the five kids, you know, home. But he's like, he'll come home for six months. He'll deploy for six months. I mean, he's just, he's relentless. And by this point, you know, in his career, he's already done six separate tours to Vietnam.

Like, he's, he's incomparable. While he's doing that, while he's... Where did you get most of your information about him from? There were, there's been a decent amount of, Well, he did a recording to capture this entire creation. He did it with Franklin Anderson. So Franklin Anderson was his commanding officer at SEAL Team 1. He finds out what Wagner has been doing and thinks that Wagner has been kind of, you know,

exceeding the boundaries of what he was been allowed to do. So Wagner, he sits down with an interviewer that he, commissions himself and he explains the whole thing. He's not going to take his time to write down everything he did but he's like you want to talk to me about this, bring an interviewer here and then you can take the transcript back to Anderson and he does it. He transcript the whole thing is recorded. He transcribes the thing and passes it back to CLT1 commander Anderson. Anderson reads the thing and becomes his greatest advocate at that point. So yeah he did break all the rules to make this happen but he didn't. It's a good little leadership

thing. Sometimes when you're in a leadership position and you're watching something happen from the outside and it looks a certain way and it's pretty easy to get caught up and you don't necessarily even have to be a leadership position. But like, you know, let's say you're watching a different unit. You know, I'm watching a Marine Corps unit and see what they're doing from afar and I think, what the hell are these guys doing? And you, if you don't, if you're not careful, you can look at someone from a distance and start to be very judgmental without actually understanding anything of that that's going on on the ground. So that's something I always

tried to be very careful of. I was watching a unit, they were doing something that didn't seem to make sense to me. Instead of me going, Ben's over there like an idiot running these operations, I would actually reach out to them.

You say, hey, Ben, can you explain to me what's going on? It looks like you're doing some wild stuff. Can you talk to me through why it's happening? That's a mistake that people make and you have to be careful of it. And that's a great example of

What do you do? If you think somebody's, well, what you should do is go talk to them. Go find out what's going on. And you know what? Maybe you do see something that maybe I do say, hey, Ben, you start telling me how you're doing it. I say, hey, you might want to think about this. You go, that's a good point, you know?

Or maybe I say, oh, wow, I understand now what you are. You know, we had a little bit of this with doing daytime operations in Ramadi. Why the hell are seals doing daytime operations? And it's like I could completely understand someone thinking that, right? What are you doing? Why are you giving up your advantage? of doing operations at night when we have night vision and the enemy doesn't hey that's a great point here's the thing we are our our actual mission tasking from the

siege of sodif is to train and fight company and platoon-sized elements of Iraqi soldiers guess what they don't have night vision matter of fact they would have one flashlight for every four guys so taking these guys out in the middle of the night was dangerous. And did we do it? Yes, we did. We did it usually in direct action raids where we could set up a situation where white light was okay because we had already, you know, set off a breach or whatever.

And now we're just clearing buildings or they're just clearing buildings. But we had to get the, in order to fight these guys, in order to get them out on the battlefield, they were going to have to do stuff in the day. That's part one. Part two is we owned the night. And you know who knew that? enemy knew that. And so guess what the enemy did at night? They didn't do anything at night. We'd go out at night. There'd be no one out there. Literally no one doing anything. But as soon as the day came out,

or as soon as the sun came up and the call to prayer went, then it was, oh, here comes the enemy. Because they know it's a more even match. And now they're out there moving amongst the civilian populace too, who's also awake and has to go, you know, down to the, down to the corner store to grab some dates from the, from his neighbor or whatever. They start moving around. So now the enemy can move around with the camouflage of the local populace. Now, if I was on the outside, seeing what the hell is task unit bruiser, they're doing daytime operations. It might not make sense.

As soon as you get an explanation like that, it's like, okay, okay, I get it. There's some reason for this happening. So that's a good lesson that got learned right there. If someone's doing something that seems a little bit crazy, ask them, find out, ask them why they're doing it. as it happens if we're gonna i mean franklin anderson is still around like he's and he is he's in his late 90s but he's still sharp as attack i talked to him maybe a week ago cool let's get him on the podcast he remembers everything that's awesome he's in derango colorado uh and anytime i call um you have to

you know start leaving a message on the machine and just start talking because eventually his wife is going to pick up and invariably she's going to pick up and she's going like, I didn't know who this was. He's in the field, you know, clearing cows or something like he's always working. What a beast. He's incredible. He's a little guy. But he's still out there and he's still like if I talk to him, if I ask him a question,

okay, so was this guy at the team in 1960s? No, that guy was an E5 in 1960. He told you he was an E6? No. How do you know this? That's awesome. Yeah, he's a character. But I got, so to answer your other question about how I got some of this information about Bob Wagner,

I spent a lot of time talking to all the folks that he had done this with, Guy Stone. I talked to his son. I talked to a lot of the people that were, you know, sort of surrounding him at the time. And he, not only is he, you know, does he build this PRU program in Vietnam, but he comes home and he builds, you know, sort of the, counterpart to the PRU program in the hills, you know, 200 miles away from the ocean. In the Chocolate Mountains, he, you know, he manages to convince a local real estate magnate to give him like 1,200 acres of mountain territory or mountain scrub.

And he overhauls the entire area, names at Camp Macon. And then he just creates a mini PRU camp to train guys how to train other people and to lead them into combat. He goes back on his last deployment. He's killed. And the Navy recognizes his contribution. He dies as a storekeeper first class, which for any of your listeners, a storekeeper first class means he's essentially a sergeant.

He's an E6. Staff sergeant, right. He's a staff sergeant. And for his contribution for, you know, creating the Navy's contribution of the PRU program, for creating everything he did in the United States, the Navy awards him a Legion of Merit, which is a totally like unheard of award for a first-class petty officer, you know, to get a two, but the Navy authorizes the V for valor with it, which never happens. So, I mean, one of the most highest, you know, wards that you can get, you know, one to a, you know,

storekeeper for his class seal. His family, who I was able to interview, his last child was born just prior to his last deployment. They were struggling to just comprehend their father's death and not having him anymore. The Navy contacts them, lets them know that he's going to be, given this incredible honor. and the Navy asks if they would like to come out for the presentation of the ceremony.

The wife asks the oldest son, the oldest of the children, who's 16 years old, and leaves it in his hands. Would you like to go out and receive your dad's award? The son decides it's too much. And he says, just mail it. I get it in the mail a couple weeks later. Dang. But this chapter is not just about the PRU.

This chapter is all about the neglect, not the neglect, but the Marine Corps deciding that they aren't going to fight in the Mekong Delta and the Marine Force Recon deciding that they're going to support the special forces on the CIDG camps. And then the Marine Corps deciding, well, we don't really, it's too risky to have those guys out there at the CIDG camps. We're going to keep them with the divisions. That it's about the LERPs or the creation of reconnaissance.

troops to support the divisions, whether it's the, you know, Project Delta with the Green Berets, or whether it's the LERPs with the individual divisions. Both of these units are, you know, they look like seals. They probably act like seals. They probably would have had the same sorts of missions as seals, you know, in different parts of the country to go out, find the enemy, you know, kill them, capture people, and bring them back. But, you know, the emphasis of all of the divisions is to get these main, these big forces into combat with the enemy.

So all they send these guys out to do is find the enemy, tell us where he is, and we'll send guys to you. I mean, it doesn't work because, you know, it's Vietnam. And they're small pockets of enemies. You know, if you don't contact them, if you don't engage them when they're there, they're gone. They're gone. They're gone. When you make that radio call,

now you've got however long it's going to be, they're going to be gone. Right, they're gone. And the most important thing about this whole period is that all of these units that are created, they're created in other parts of the country. country. They leave the one area of the country that has the most water, that has the most, you know, reason for the Navy to be there, completely open, open for another unit to come in.

Um, open for one unit to come in. Let's go to chapter 13. The derailing of the first direct action seals in the rung sat and the detachment that restored their prospects. Real quick. When the seals of detachment delta or debt delta, as, it was called arrived in February, 1966. They numbered just three officers and 15 enlisted men, not much more than a single enhanced platoon, but a platoon so important to seal aspirations that it was led by Lieutenant James Barnes,

seal team one's commanding officer. Known as a friendly and capable administrator, the ideal sort for forging partnerships and acquiring in-country assets. Barnes was a firm believer in the seal's traditional interpretation of direct action and upon arrival set to gathering intelligence on all the enemy's command posts radar dishes and bridges Barnes's problem these simply did not exist on a map the 400 or so square miles worth of rivers and canals of the rung sat special zone

look like the splitting curving bronchials seen in the cross section of a human lung on the ground this lung was a putrid tidewater swamp that when flushed left behind a morass of boots sucking mud flats and twisted root peninsulas the high ground of which could mostly be measured above the water line with a yardstick called the evil place by the locals or the forest of assassins by the Americans and was and known as it as a past hideout for pirates the rung sat was by the time of the seal's arrival reinforcing all of these reputations since it was the source of an increasing number of rocket attacks on Saigon plus riverbank ambushes along Saigon's main shipping channel. So there you go.

Here comes this guy, Barnes rolling in like, hey, we know what we're going to do? We're to take out their radar positions. We're going to take out their bridges. That's what we're going to do. Where are they? They don't exist. It's not that kind of war. I mean, this, I mean, you know, the example that you just used about, you know, getting to Ramadi and, you know, expecting to contact the enemy at night and do everything.

Like, the one thing that I've learned about frogmen, or at least, you know, this modern, you know, interpretation of them is they're going to adapt to find the enemy. And this is one instance where we don't. And we almost, or the seal team almost, you know, got turned away at the front door. I know Barnes comes in, like you said. he finds that there's nothing that they've trained for. And his response, you know, not really, you know, not having ever done this before and not having, you know, any real, you know, playbook, you know, to work from, he decides, you know, we're, this isn't for us.

And the series of liberty incidents ensue and the Navy is ready, you know, kick the, you know, kick the, uh, kick the, uh, you're not, you're not engaging the enemy like we expected you to. And two,

you're causing problems. So, uh, what do you want? So they turn, you know, to the commander of all the, uh,

uh, seals and country who just so happens to be the person responsible for putting them there, Phil Bucklew. And they, they present this whole problem to them. Bucklew, uh,

appeals to, uh, the commander of Mac V's, uh, understanding of the naval tradition of leadership, change the leader, you're going to change the rest of the organization. So Barnes is removed after Bucklew's intercession, and an entire new detachment replaces debt delta, that is Deteg Golf.

And Debt Golf, the commander of Debt Golf is a junior officer by the name of Maynard Wires, comes in and completely overhauls what the seals are doing. Not overhauls the mission. Because the mission up to that point had really just been to go out into the country, set ambushes where you could, see if you could find the enemy. Although they hadn't had any success. But just because they hadn't had success, Wires doesn't say that that's an excuse.

Like I said in the book, his... His message to his men at the time was, this is the only war in town. We're not going to let it go to waste. And so he sends his guys out every night. And he goes with them. I mean, they're out in the muck and the misery of the rung sat special zone. And night after night, whether you contact the enemy or not,

we're going to be going out. So adapt yourself to that expectation. And that's the detachment that restored their prospects. It does. I mean, by the end of that deployment, I think they have something like 80 kills. Most of them are from one single contact. But they, I mean, they make things easier for themselves. They create like a houseboat of a old World War II-era landing craft.

They make it so they don't have to, you know, return to base so often. They improve their living conditions. They essentially just start going out for a few hours at a time. and finding the enemy where possible, responding to reports of enemy contact, and then patrolling to those areas. And they get, you know, they're not, you know, they're not what we understand to be the SEALs today,

but they're awfully close. What was Operation Jack Stay? Operation Jack Stay is an attempt, it was sort of a Marine Corps Navy mission right at the beginning, right when debt, Delta gets in country and it's a sort of a Marine Corps led mission to sort of sweep this one suspected corner of the Rung Sat Special Zone. And it's a I think they claim it, you know, to be this, you know, huge success when in fact it's it's a bit of a disaster. There's multiple heat casualties

in the process. There is a, there are a couple of enemy kills. I think the only thing real that they find in the entire three-week-long mission is a Viet Cong hospital, sort of a built-up section of log pathways and little huts. And other than that, they don't find much. SEAL teams try to contribute to it. UDTs contribute to it. The UDTs bring, I cut a bit of a section of the book on Operation Jack's Day. it was mostly a litany of failures by both the seals and the UDTs.

They had bad gear. They had, you know, they just, their contribution wasn't significant. So. And you mentioned Guy Stone when you were talking about Wagner. What was his? Guy Stone, he didn't get much in the book. He gets a, he gets a brief, you know, nod. And that's, he, he.

helps he's he's he's Wagner's best friend he's Wagner's best friend in the world he helps set up the PRU training camp but he's also important because he was a Korean war soldier

he was a forward observer in the US army so when the leadership at SEAL Team 1 is trying to you know adapt you know their naval commando force to be to you know to have more you know hard army skills who do they turn to? You know, outside of, you know, their traditional avenues for support, you know,

the ranger school and things like that, they turn to a former soldier, Guy Stone. Guy Stone sets up a curriculum. It gets smart on all of his old army manuals, and he sets up training for SEAL Team One and starts putting all the guys through it. Before they go to Vietnam, they've got to go through Guy Stone's course. So they manage to, and again, I mean, you have so many good stories, there about what happened, what this looked like, who these characters were. Now we move into chapter 14.

The direct action seals who dodged diversion, then perfected a mission that propelled the teams past the riverbanks into history. Going to the book here, in the winter of 1956, Robert T. Gallagher joined UDTR. And I said that already today one time, but this is what Buds used to be called was UDTR, which is universal underwater demolition teams replacement training. So Gallagher joined UDTR class 17 at Little Creek, a class comprised of 97 personnel, including five Navy officers, five U.S. Army soldier graduates from Ranger School, and one black sailor from Ohio, who remarkably had taught himself to swim in a creek after a town order to integrate the local pool. had prompted the owner to fill it with rocks. How'd you dig up that piece of information? I mean, that was from Bill Goines.

He was the first black seal. He'd been one of the plank owners at SEAL Team 2. And he's, you know, just, I mean, he's still alive and still contributing. He's helping with the Navy's recruitment efforts of black sailors. I mean, he's of, you know, minorities. He's an incredible person. And there's not a trace of, you know, bitterness. I mean, he's just, I mean, he has every right to be bitter, you know,

for, you know, everything that he went through. And he's just talking to him is just, it's just such a, you know, it's a pleasure to talk to him. Let's get him on the podcast. At one point in the first few weeks of the temperature had dropped so low that Gallagher and his classmates had been forced to break the ice that had crusted the edge of the Chesapeake base so their instructors could torture them in it.

A ritual not unheard of in UDT's East Coast winter classes. After four weeks of this, four weeks of heaving logs over wind-swept sand dunes, four weeks of wet fatigues freezing to their skin, four weeks of elephant marches with boats on their head, a misery that had rubbed Gallagher's thinning Widow's-Ead, already thinning Widows Peak raw, more than 50% of the class had quit,

including one of the Navy officers and all five of the Ranger School graduates. It was just too psychological for that one man remembered. And there had been so much farther to go. After a total of 16 weeks, class 17 had shrunk to a mere shadow of itself. Of the 97 who had started, only 14 graduated. One of those, incidentally, was the undaunted black sailor from Ohio. Another, of course, was Gallagher.

Gallagher's subsequent career in the UDTs was more than commendable. Wherever he went, he excelled and more. This reputation, plus his standing as a sturdy drinker, had made him a natural choice for the first batch of frogmen to join SEAL Team 2. There, he had excelled again, undertaking the most difficult assignments, including a course to qualify as an explosive ordinance disposal technician, or EOD Tech, one of the military's more cerebral ratings, and an eight-month overseas advisory billet to Istanbul, where he helped train the first all-T-Nayvish Navy UDT class.

From these assignments, it was possible for Gallagher's peers to assemble a portrait of his personality, hard-charging and intense, yet entirely devoid of pretense. When deployed, it was only on the rare occasion he was seen in anything but a grumpled pair of UDT shorts. He was above all known for his quiet confidence, the oxygen of his leadership, but with the emphasis on quiet. He had all the sensitivity of a rock, remembered one teammate. Unless at a bar, the only place he seemed to allow his sense of humor to walk around

off leash, he was just more pulled into himself than others, remembered a teammate, just tough to get to know. for the force of it for for the force of his personality for his combat experience Gallagher was from the moment he joined the seventh platoon's unofficial leader no one argued with him said Roy Matthews about to depart on his first deployment you might win the fight but you'd never want to go to sleep again the reality was actually less slightly less severe certainly Gallagher was all the aforementioned was remote intense almost humorless but There was another quality that would soon help him become one of the best combat leaders in the history of the Navy.

Essentially an orphan from the day Gallagher had joined the seals, they had been, whether they knew it or not, his family. Nothing mattered as much to him. Nothing except maybe the mission, a mission whose evolution would have no greater contributor than Gallagher. He's a, I don't even know where to start with Gallier. I always, I say that I don't like the term hero, but if I have to, if you had to pick one, or if you had to pick a person, you know, to kind of, you know, set up as a, as an example for young Frogman, this is it. He's the anti-Marcinco. You know, the, he's the, he's not boastful.

he's not he never stretched the truth on anything that he ever did partly because he just never talked about what he did I mean he I managed to talk to you know I mean I interviewed a lot of people for the book and I'd always find a way to you know

convince somebody to talk to me um I when I finally was able to track Gallagher down uh you know I kind of took deep breath, dial the number. He answered the phone. I hastily ran through.

Hi, this is Ben Milligan. I'm writing a history. I'm a former CEO, blah, blah, blah, blah, trying to get through, like, you know, my introduction. Tell him, you know, I'm going to be writing about the Seventh Platoon. I would love to hear your perspective. I've talked to many of your teammates. I've talked to Pete Peterson.

I've talked to Roy Matthews. I've talked to, you know, all these guys. would love to get your perspective if you have time. He, right here, takes a pause and he goes, I don't think I want to do that. Then he hangs up.

All the work that I had done. That was that, huh? That was it. That was your interview. That was it. Did you ever get anything out of him? Nope. Never did.

Talk to everybody. I mean, everyone in his orbit. Learned, I mean, learned as much about him as I've learned about anybody. He had, when you were reading through that, you know,

there was stuff that didn't make the book. Like when I say he's essentially an orphan, I mean, he's essentially an orphan. And I hope that, you know, a reader or a listener, you know, has some sense of what that means. Like his childhood was nothing less than heartbreaking. His father abandoned him and his sister, him and his brother and his sister to a, and their mother who had tuberculosis, essentially to a sanatorium. When the mother died, both Bob and his sister were placed in two separate orphanages. Bob, at the time, I believe, was only around four years old. His sister was two and a half, and they were so close, inseparable,

that every night Bob would escape his dormitory in the orphanage, sneak across this really, really wide expanse of a field between the girls' dormitory, sneak into the girls' dorm and sneak into her bed just so she wouldn't have to sleep alone. And this is when he was four years old? Yeah. How did you get this information? From his niece, who was essentially raised, like, I mean, not, I don't know if he, she was very close to her uncle. He, uh, but he had, he, I mean, it wasn't just the war that, you know, made him, or just combat that, that made him, you know, insular and, you know, shut off from everybody.

he was, I think, you know, the fates kind of contributed, you know, to create that person. And he was not a broken person, but he had a real hard time relating to folks. You know, he had a, you know, a bad relationship with his own children. His, it was estranged from his wife. His wife never divorced him, but he was estranged from her. And he, you know, he had just a really, you know, tough time. I think the only person that he was really close to, in life aside from you know his teammates aside from you know somebody like peterson

was his sister um as a side note uh this last muster uh down at fort pierce they had you know because of covid have you ever been to fort pierce and they do the muster they the i haven't been the muster but but i know about the asher swim but tell it tell everyone that's awesome so they they were doing an ashes swim they uh every uh every year at Fort Pierce, once a year they will do an ashes swim. So if anyone connected to NSW has died in the previous year and they would like their ashes to be committed to the ocean, they will, they do a sunrise swim out into the Atlantic, and two of your teammates will escort your ashes out into the sea and they'll release their ashes. I'd never been to one of these

things. I'd heard about them. This year, I was invited down to give a talk on the history of the teams, and they asked me if I would participate the next morning in one of these swims. I knew Pete Peterson was going to be there. I met, you know, I interviewed Pete a number of times for the book, and I knew that he was going to be swimming. Bob's ashes. Bob died several months before, and he was going to be swimming Bob's ashes. In addition to Bob's ashes, there were two other members of the 7th platoon whose ashes were going to be swum out.

So I told Pete, if you need a swim buddy for this, I'm happy to join you. And he was more than happy to accept. So the next morning we're out there, you know, 4 a.m., they want us to all muster, you know, kind of backed by the museum, away from the ocean. And it's November and it's pretty cold. It's in probably the high 40s. And, you know, we're just out there in swim trunks with, you know, flippers and, you know, they're

going down the roster. Okay. Here's a, here's a name, you know, Bob Gallagher, who's swimming Bob. You know, Pete, you know, he's in his mid-80s at this point. He raises his hand. He's, you know, got, he's an older guy. But he's a, I'm swimming Bob. It's like, all right, who's swimming with Pete. I was like I shot my hand up so fast. I was swimming with Pete. But after, you know, you get your assignments, you know, right, you know, before sunrise, they march you out. And I was not expecting, you know, sort of the spectacle of what was out there. They had a shadow box set up for every person whose ashes were being swum out. So about 40 different shadow boxes with a, you know, flag, and then behind that, you know, facing the ocean, probably 50 people per

shadow box of family members that were all assembled there to watch their loved ones, ashes be and swim out to sea. They had, you know, bagpipes, they had a Navy band. They had a flag team. It was a huge, huge collection of thousands of people on the beach. They do a flag ceremony. So they kind of, they position the swimmers, you know, behind the shadow box facing the family. And they go down one by one and they'll do a, you know, presentation of the flag to the family. Now they had, you know, set us up, me and, you know, me and Pete behind Bob's ashes. But right next to Bob's family, they had Roy Matthews, who was also in the 7th platoon. and they also had Ron Yaw.

Ron Yaw's family was right there too. And they were both members of Seven Platoon. And I'm standing there with Pete, who was, you know, their OIC, you know, in Vietnam. And you can see Pete's getting emotional here. And I don't blame him. I would have been, too. And I'm starting to think, you know, seeing Pete,

and they finally, you know, after the flag presentation, they hand you the ashes and they hand Bob's ashes, you know, to us. Bob's at least 20 pounds. I mean, yeah, the bag of ashes, it's pretty heavy. I'm looking at, you know, Pete, and they finally tell us, you know, about face, start marching to the ocean. We start backing up.

Guys are getting online, you know, putting fins on. Pete's having, you know, a little bit of a tough time getting those fins on. I'm starting to see the line, you know, kind of edge away from us a little bit. Like, we're starting to be like, all right, me and Pete are starting to get left behind here a little bit. Like I'm starting to wonder if, you know, the waves are pretty big. for Florida. I've never seen waves that big in Florida, but we're starting to back into it. I'm looking at Pete, and I'm like, Pete, we don't have to do this, man.

We can find somebody else to swim. You know, Bob out. We'll take care of this. If you can't do this. Pete looks at me, and he goes, I think there's really only one thing to do here. And it's like, all right, I start to grab his arm, like, we're going to head back in. He takes off. Like, he dies through that wave. He went from being like an 83-year-old man to a 25-year-old frogman like that.

I couldn't keep up with him. I'm doing everything I can. I'm dragging Bob. Going through the surf. And get out there through the breakers. Sun comes up. Command comes out. I hand Bob to Pete.

Pete lets him go. I mean, the whole thing. The whole 10 years of work on this book. It was worth it in that moment. I mean, you can see it. Like, you see it there. Like, you see like, I mean, even the guys, I've been talking to guys that are, you know, from that era. Guys that aren't even mentioned in the book.

But they are, you know, to a man, they are, you know, they all express, you know, how pleased they are. That, you know, Bob's contribution, you know, Bob Gallagher, who's, you know, never, you know, never, you know, touted his own achievements. I mean, anybody's going to, you know, uh, capture the, you know, the attention of that era. I mean, that should be him. It's an interesting thing about him, too, that, I mean, he, like, I say he's the anti-Marsenko. He's, he's not, you know, he's not a, he, he had such pride in the rest of the, the Navy.

Like in a way that, you know, I, when I set out to write this book, I always assume that I'd be writing a book, that confirmed all the myths about us, that we did all this ourselves. And then the Navy was always the branch of, the parent command that was trying to keep us assigned to the water. And I found the opposite to be true. And then when I discover Bob Gallagher, Bob Gallagher's lasting legacy, if anything,

is how much pride he had, not just in the SEAL teams, but in his parent service too. He left the SEAL teams. One of the last things he did, he took a commission, which I don't know that anybody, knows about it, but he took a commission as a warrant officer. And one of the first things he did was he had to leave the seal teams. He had to go to an aircraft carrier and work on this aircraft carrier with fleet sailors.

And every seal that he ever met afterwards, to a man, he told them it was one of the things he was most proud of. He was able to see, you know, the U.S. Navy at work and see how committed, you know, his fellowship mates and sailors were, you know, they weren't seals. Maybe these guys couldn't, you know, couldn't run and couldn't do the things that frogmen can do. But they still had pride in their work and they still, you know, had a mission to do. And he was, you know, every bit as proud of that as he was of his, you know, career in the teams. When did you, what stood out, how did you get to that, that platoon? You know, I, I spent, you know, I spent, you know,

know, a long time, a long time trying to figure out where that transition had occurred, you know, that transition from where the seal platoons were, you know, patrol and ambushers to, you know, capture kill commandos. And, you know, Marsenko, he makes all these claims in his, you know, Rogue Warrior book that it was his platoon, that it was the eighth platoon that made that transition. And I went through and I was gathering as many, you know, barn dance cards or after action reports as I could. And, you know, I was going through operation by operation, platoon by platoon, trying to see, like, you know,

who had made that transition. I went through eighth platoon, you know, among others, I was plotting insertion points, extraction points, actions on objective points for every one of their missions. And, you know, after, you know, doing three months' worth of Marcinko's missions, I realized every claim that he had made in Rogue Warrior is bullshit. Like, which is sad because, you know, what his platoon did, was totally commendable.

It was incredible, like what his platoon did. And their contribution to Chowd Duck during the Tet Offensive, amazing. But, you know, he was making, you know, outlandish claims and, you know, and not only burnishing his legacy, but doing it at the expense of other folks, too. I couldn't understand why he was. But, I mean, I found the seven platoon because I was just methodically going through these platoons, you know, platoon at a time, operation at a time. And I noticed in the seven platoons, you know, this, they started out like a,

everybody else. You know, they got to, you know, Vietnam, and they would get a little bit of intel, and they would go out, they'd set an ambush, they'd patrol to contact. But by, you know, the three-month mark in their deployment, their operations take a noticeable turn, and this is when they meet their interpreter, Min, who's a former, or who's a Vietnamese sailor, and they enlist him into the organization. He's not just an interpreter, though. He's like a source of intel. Like, he's, he's able to connect them to, you know, institutions in the country that, you know, provide them a wealth of information. And then they start going out, and they're not just going out for Via Kong. They're going out for Via Kong with names.

They know who they're going after. So you know that the seven platoon makes that turn. And by the end of that platoon, by the summer of 1968, the platoon that followed the seven platoon, they're, you know, they're doing what the seven platoon did. but better. I mean, Rudy Bosch, you know, rolls in with the 10th platoon. And every platoon then, it franchises at that point. Every platoon, whether it's a seal, an East Coast platoon or a West Coast platoon, they're all doing it.

They're all, you know, relying on this capture-kill mission. And it doesn't really start to trickle off until, you know, the war really starts to drive the end of the funnel. The money starts to shut off. You know, they stop getting, you know, rounds for their M16s. They don't get any more gas money for their jeeps. They take jeeps away from them. They make them start doing watch standing on various bases at their own.

So all the intel collection that they've been doing up to that point in the war, it's starting to get, you know, they're not able to do it like they were in like, you know, 69, 70, 71. Well, first of all, you want to get some seals mad, make them stand watch. Oh, yeah. I read that. These guys get so bad. We had a, we had a, uh, uh, to stand watch.

We had to stand watch on people. We captured actually when my first deployment to Iraq. And you would have thought, like I didn't say, hey, guys, get jocked up. We got a QRF to do wherever, but get your gear on. We're going into freaking hell. Guys would be like, cool. But you say, hey, I know we just did that mission. You got to stay and watch at 5 o'clock in the morning.

You kidding me. He's so pissed off. I would take that. I would take the 2 o'clock in the morning to 4 o'clock. Myself and the AOIC would take the worst watch of the night, the one that you had to wake up in the middle of the night, you know. The other ones you could kind of sleep until, no, not us, but guys don't like standing watch.

The other thing that's interesting about this is, you know, having talked to a number of SOG guys, man, they were so compartmentalized. they would get like no turnover. Things would happen. They would never tell anybody. Right. And I mean,

I'm talking like lesson learned from an operation. Hey, don't use this type of weapon in this situation. They'd never hear that. It was, well, not never, but it was very limited

to how much they would be able to pass on or that they would receive. It would all be kind of centralized. Like maybe it'd be one guy that would debrief them. So the fact that the seals were sharing, hey, this is a better way to do operations here's where we can make a huge impact.

That's important from a leadership perspective when you're out there working in a company, in a business, and a team. When you learn something, pass it on so everyone can benefit. The other thing that was like, I mean, totally benefited the SEALs at this point is, you know, this policy that the rest of the military had of individual rotation. They thought that having, you know, you know, constant, you know, presence there, you know, was easier to, you know, keep all the equipment there, but we'll just, you know, feed guys onezy, twosies into a unit.

It's horrible. It's terrible. Yeah. You know, they get to country, nobody knows them, nobody trusts them. They don't know anybody else. Nobody wants to train them. Never worked together. They never worked together.

The Green Berets did that. The Lerps did that. I mean, all of these special units that we call special, you know, they are learning together as they operate. All the time. All the time. And then the best guys are getting pulled out. Whereas the SEAL teams, they were always,

deploying as a group. They were coming home as a group. They were training together and they would redeploy as a group. Yeah. And by the way, you get turnover operations. Not like this, everyone shows up and now no one knows what to do. You get turnover operations. Right. There's a period, two week period. Yeah. So it's not like you're, wait, doesn't it kind of make sense to have new guys cycling and that way you still got some experience guys? No, it doesn't. Got to work together. Yeah. Moving on to chapter 15. And I think this might be Echo's favorite title right here. I think so. The Navy's skeleton key to inland combat and the final against the current achievements in the war's ebb tide that exposed the SEAL's preeminence as the U.S. militaries go anywhere commandos.

I even got you laughing at this, Ben. Your editor. Well, I, in my editor's defense, I'm the one that wrote the titles. As you said, it kind of explains us, you know, what's going on here a little bit. Let me go to the book. Within two months of his arrival, Zomwal, that's the Admiral Zomalt strategy, Zomwald's strategy had pulled swift boats from the coastal blockade to take over the PBR patrols in the lower Delta and had reclaimed some 90% of the vessels assigned to the mobile riverine force to push into bloody alley of the parrot's beak.

That portion of Cambodia that stabbed the insurgency supply lines like a knife into the Delta's heart. With Zumwalt's arrival, the seals went from being the fleet's prodigal stepchild, raiders, to the fleet's skeleton key to inland opportunities, opportunities for Navy boats, Navy ships, Navy fighters, Navy helicopters, Navy gunships, Navy intelligence officers, even Navy Seabees. to goose the Navy's involvement in seal operations, Zoom Walt, always wearing forest green fatigues, and occasionally accompanied by a camera and crew and reporters, routinely dropped in on his platoons, and always posed a variant of the same question,

How can I help? In short order, that help was showing up in piastres for Hoy Chans and interpreters, Navy Jeeps to meet with sources, daily grocery drops by the Navy's helicopter transports. After the friendly fire death of Lieutenant Junior grade David Nichols, ZoomWalt took less than three days to invest in, invest one seal compound with an actual Navy physician.

All told, it was the kind of self-serving that helped infuse the seals with an even greater operational capacity, so much so that within six months of ZoomWalt's arrival, the headquarters of the SEALs task group commander in Vietnam was finally upgraded from a cluttered desk at CTF 116 to an entire Kwanzen hut. I need 15 more, 20 more, 100 more SEALs remembered three war veteran frogman Frank Kane of Zoom Walt's repeated calls to increase his compliment. When such requests collided with the reality of SEAL's actual manning numbers, no level. Novels nowhere close to the Green Berets. Zoom Walt even enlisted the efforts and advice of the commander of U.S. naval forces in the Philippines

None other than the bullfrog himself, Admiral Draper Kaufman. So that's a huge turning point when you start getting this massive support from Zoom Walt. Yeah, I mean, the seals are no longer, like, they're no longer at the fringe of the Navy's operations. Is there the, they're the harpoon that, you know, not only is, you know, striking, you know, into the heart of the enemy, but just like a harpoon, it's attached to a rope. It's pulling the rest of the Navy inland.

Yeah, that little detail that you got in there of Zoom wall, always wearing camis or always wearing fatigues, that's just like, yeah, I mean, it's a, you're always on the lookout for whatever, you know, that little detail that's going to, you know, it's going to say something else to your reader. I mean, just the fact that, you know, his sideburns alone, like, convey to the rest of his sailors that, hey, I'm cool. Oh, cool like you.

You know, like, I mean, up to that point in, you know, in the Navy, there's no beards allowed. I mean, when he becomes C&O, you know, what's back in fashion in the U.S. Navy? Beards. He brings it all back. But I mean, he's totally, you know, he's a, he has the bona fides to do it. He's a junior officer all through the, through World War II. He's one of the only sailors to take a ship up the Wampo River into Shanghai. He actually sees what Sacco is doing at the tail into World War II.

He turns over or he does a prisoner exchange with Phil Bucklew in 1945. And he's seen, even if he's not participated in it, he's gotten a glimpse of what the Navy's capable of. And when he gets there to Vietnam, he knows the Navy could be doing more. And then, you know, not only is his role as the commander of naval forces in Vietnam important, but he's the one that ultimately becomes the chief of naval operations. He's, you thought the SEALs were, you know, important before. I mean, when he becomes a C&O. I mean, you're vaulting the seals of preeminence, along with him.

Pretty neat, the Zoom Walt class ships, USS Mikey Montsor. Oh, it's incredible. Just, I mean, that connection is, yeah, it's so cool. How about as this is, you know, you got trying to put together like Bob Carey's mission. Yeah. How hard was that? It's not, Bob Carey's mission, it's sort of. it's sort of a one-off.

Like, and I thought, you know, I thought about focusing on Bob Carey's mission for the chapter, but it's, it's not a, it's not like an indicator of like the Navy's inland adventurism because it's right on the coast. It's right in Natrang Bay. What, what signifies that it's important in, you know, like the seals sort of like elbowing out its competitors is the fact that it's right around the corner from where the Green Berets are operating. Like that's their, that's their corner of the war. So yeah, it's coastal, but it should have been in the Green Berets territory. And here comes, you know, Seal Team 1,

along with CTF 115, CTF 115 is the coastal squadron or the coastal task force. They get their first seals and what do they do with them? They start sending them everywhere. And it is. It's one of I mean, you look at that mission, and it's so different from what the rest of the SEAL teams are doing in the Mekong Delta. But it's so indicative of, you know, this transformation that the SEALs have gone through. They're not a, you know, patrol and ambush force anymore. Now they're going after individual Vietam so they can capture them, flip them, or ransack them for, you know, other locations. So the whole mission is not a this is an entrepreneurial. This is not a, you know, let's see, let's see what we get.

They know who they're going for. They've got good information and they, you know, they plan a really cool special operation to go get them. Did you feel tempted to get sucked into the sea wolves at all? Oh, yeah. Because I've had the sea wolves. I had to keep them at arm's length. I was like, I don't have time. I was like, I would find, I found so, I had, I had a lot of documents about the seawolf too.

I was like, man. And there, I mean, Navy, just the Navy, you know, gunship squadrons alone. I mean, they've gone through, you know, very, very similar, you know, experience of, let's bring them back. Let's disband them again. Bring them back, disband them again. Well, you and I experienced that. I mean, we had the reserve squadrons that were working pretty much as the Sea Woolware. Wolf said they were like at the beck and call of the seals you know my first deployment to

Iraq it was we work with those guys all the time they were our full support and they were fantastic fantastic but the sea wolves in Nam man commissioned in Vietnam and decommissioned the only squadron ever to be commissioned in combat and decommissioned in combat there's that one story they they're running out of fuel there's a platoon on the ground they're like we're not leaving. One bird's like, hey, we're not leaving. We'll just run out of gas. So they have enough gas to get in there and grab the last few guys, but they don't have enough gas to make it back to base. They land in the middle of a rice paddy somewhere, and they're using an ammo can to siphon fuel into an ammo can and pour it into the huey to get that thing back to base, bro. These

guys, when you talk to, and the Vietnam sales I've had on the podcast, they just absolutely without question, love the seawolf guys because those seawolf guys, they took so much risk to support the seals on the ground. You know, when I was, there were a couple episodes when I was, I would come, I would see

like a report of an army slick who, you know, it said, well, we're not going to land or something like that. And then the report of a seawolf pilot saying, well, if you don't land, I'm going to shoot you down. And I was, I was a little skeptical of that. I was like, I don't know if that's, that's cricket. And then I found another one. I was like, I'm wondering if

This happened maybe a couple of times. It made it into the buck. I mean, not to ever diminish what those army slick pilots did. They were, I mean, they were doing the Lord's work too. But. Yeah. And then as you're trying to get like the last three years of the war. Yeah, to compress that. How hard was that?

That's tough. And I had to, you know, I realized that I made my point. I knew that, you know, I'd accomplish what I set forth to, to establish, which is, you know, the moment when the, sealed became what we are today. You know, so now all I'm, all I was trying to do is just kind of, one, you know, further solidify, you know, how that had happened. And, you know, I discovered some stuff along the way.

Like, you know, the, the ninth, or the ninth division being, you know, the ninth, one of the most interesting things to, you know, show, you know, how the, the Navy had become, you know, so, you know, important in the Mekong Delta is, you know, Finally, the 9th Division starts copying the seals. The LERPS start to de-conflict areas and take them away from the seals. And the seals are, you know, they want to go out and, you know, do this raid. And they can't because the Army is already there. And the very good chance that if the war had continued on, you know, for a little bit longer,

that the Army would have, you know, taken all the Navy's missions and the SEALs would have had to either move someplace else, adapt again. I'm not sure what would have happened. but there's a good chance that the Army's special operations would have gotten a lot better, a lot better or a lot faster. But they pull the 9th Division out of the country altogether, leaving the SEAL teams as the only All-American Commando Force and the entire Fourth Corps for two years. Which, I mean, talk about opportunity.

You know, going back to the Sea Wolves and them being answering the call, You know, that's something that I learned out of the gate when I got to SEAL teams was that, hey, in NOM, if it was a platoon in trouble or if it was a downpilot, we were going. Bright light, no questions asked. That's a, that's an attitude that stuck through, you know, till this day. If something's going on like that, we're going. I mean, whatever, I don't know if it was pulled from, you know, the Cs. sea wolves, but we saw it carry through, I mean, in our time. I mean, the SEAL Team 10, I mean, they came to the, you know, rescue of, you know, their SDV squad. The Gold Squadron Seals, I mean, they were on their way to, you know, come to the aid of Army Rangers.

You know, are they in trouble? Yeah. Is it dangerous? Yep. Are you going to go? We sure are. Yep. I mean, it's... If Americans are in trouble, I mean, you're going to go.

I mean, that's... You know, when you start talking about Tommy Norris and his activities. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. Like, you... I mean, how much did Tommy risk, you know, to come... To rescue somebody who never knew. I think 11 other Americans had died. attempting to rescue, you know, those two, you know, the pilot and the navigator.

And not only, I mean, he, you know, he was there with his Vietnamese Rangers. I mean, like, the thing that never, you know, ceases to amaze me is the fact that the SEAL teams were the recipient of all of that accumulated knowledge, of all that, of all that legacy, you know, Darby's legacy and the Cabanatine legacy and the Pointe to Hawk, all that, you know, all that knowledge got compressed into the Ranger School and there are no Rangers. So the SEAL teams became the biggest, you know, collection of Ranger School graduates in the U.S. military. And then, you know, not only, you know, is there that connection with Tommy Norris, you know, leading Vietnamese Rangers, but the SEALs at the Seals at the 7th Platoon SEALs,

during the Tet Offensive at Mito, Bob Gallagher leads a squad of seals, you know, through the streets of Mito to help call in air strikes for the stranded Vietnamese seals or Vietnamese Rangers. But yeah, Bob, or Tommy Norris coming, you know, risking everything. And he and his Rangers had undergone, you know, a pretty terrible mortar attachment. the night before he went out on that raid or went out on that rescue mission.

I can't remember off the top of my head how many of his of his Rangers were killed in that attack. But I mean, combat ineffective. He only had a handful of Rangers left and him and Kit, you know, still decide there's an American in trouble. We're going to get them. It's just remarkable to me. It goes out and talking to, so you ask the question, how do you?

you compress, you know, essentially with a three-year period of history into a single, you know, 15-page chapter. And, you know, you have two of, you know, the most, you know, iconic seal missions of the war that occurred during this period, or not two, but multiple. I mean, you've got, you know, Bob Carey's mission, you've got Tommy Norris's mission, you've got Thornton's mission to rescue Norris. At some point I had the idea, like, I can't cover all of that. And, you've got, and And it's not not necessarily, it's not outside the scope of what I was doing, but it's redundant to what I've already shown. So I don't need to do that. But I do want to cover it and pay it a nod or, you know, describe it in a way that other folks probably haven't.

And I had read, you know, the books on Tommy and Mike Thornt, and I'd read the book on Tommy rescuing, or the most recent books on those events. And the things that I noticed that they didn't cover were the Medal of Honor ceremonies for each event. And I thought, wouldn't that be an interesting way to, you know, wrap up the book with Tommy Norris's Medal of Honor ceremony? Because Mike Thornton's Medal of Honor ceremony happened several years earlier. Tommy's doesn't happen until 1976.

Vietnam War is over. Fall of Saigon has happened. You can capture all of this history that's happened if you, you know, use that. that moment as a vehicle. So that's what I did. And I contacted, you know, Tommy Norris. And he was, you know, who I con, who I, I, Mark Robbins, who was on that deployment, lost his eye to a machine gunner's bullet.

Tommy had been, Tommy had helped counsel him through, you know, the, you know, losing the eye. And so Mark had Tommy's phone number. I just cold called him one day. Got him with a phone and had a, you know, kind of a series of talks with him. But he just couldn't have been, you know, just a more accessible, more, more friendly guy, just a humble, humble guy, you know, considering everything he's been through, everything he's done. And, you know, what was funny is he always, you know, he didn't minimize what he, I mean, he did minimize what he did. but he also, like, was so proud of, you know, his post-war, you know, career in the FBI.

He had this, like, and he had a, he had a, I mean, in addition to his, you know, seal career, he had this legendary FBI career. He was, you know, he was a undercover agent. He was going after international terrorists as an undercover agent. And his, his cover was that of, like, a one-eyed arms dealer. And nobody ever doubted him. He was a He was you know he went after white supremacist in Idaho

He one of the best stories that I heard about him was that He was up on a wire And he had been listening to this white supremacist for A few months And he knew that this guy won Had this big Rottweiler that it was his pride and joy He loved this dog And he was taking him

taking him to the vet for some, you know, not serious issue, but he was going to leave the dog there overnight. So Tommy, you know, having listened to this guy's voice for like a month, he could imitate him pretty well. So the night that the dog was there, Tommy makes a phone call to the vet. He's like, hey, while the dog's there, why don't you go ahead and neuter him? I don't know if it's true. I don't know if this is an accurate story, but this is all this. It didn't get in the book because I couldn't verify it. The other story that I heard, and this was from a Vietnam Air Seal,

who was one of the first team leaders at H.R.T. So Tommy wasn't one of the founders of H.R.T., but he was one of the plank owners. He was one of the first guys to go through the H.R.T. selection. And so H.R.T. was in, they were conducting one of their very first operations in 1985. It was against a, or they were trying. to apprehend a Puerto Rican nationalist who was a semi, essentially it was a terrorist. But they were conducting a, I believe, in a arrest warrant, and they were going up the stairs

to this guy's house. He leans over the balcony with a machine gun and stitches the entire assault team and shoots one operator in the eye. The team backs out and, you know, Charles or Sandy Prudy, who's a, who's a, you know, Silver Star Seal himself, the team leader for HRT. He's trying to come up with a plan to go in and get this guy. Tommy comes running up to Sandy. He goes, Sandy, I've got a plan to get this guy.

He's like, all right, Tommy, what's the plan? How about I run upstairs and kill him? Check. Freaking outstanding. I don't know if we could find a better place to wrap it up than that. The book is awesome. You know, we've been in and out of different stories. We're not even touching what's in this book.

This book is just absolutely filled with incredible stuff. It's incredible story. So get the book. Echo, you got anything? I don't. You sure? I'm sure. All right.

Ben, I've kept you captive. Speaking of hostage. rescue. I think you're going to get busted out of here in a second. Somebody's probably looking for you. So I appreciate you coming. I can't thank you enough. This is a treat for me. Anytime I get to talk about this stuff is great. Thanks for the support of the book too. This is I can't thank you enough. Well, the amount of effort that you put in this book, the product is just outstanding. And I can't even fathom that there would be someone else that would go through the effort that you did to to do this you know you're like you got issues dude you got issues that's true

but so do you oh i do too i mean you think about it like leaving the teams is a is a dramatic event that's traumatic which you have proved look at this look at the i mean the the infrastructure that's surrounding you at this point it's a you have to do something to account for that trauma and i always used to think that I was immune to, you know, you know, leaving, leaving the teams, and I was never going to, you know, fill it with anything else. And, you know, I'd never gotten any tattoos. I'd never, you know, I didn't get into triathlons or anything like that. Um, I just had this huge blind spot creeping up on me that I didn't even know about. And, uh, once, once this thing found me, I mean, I was, I was hostage to it. Like, there wasn't anything. I mean, it was, it dominated my

I mean, it was, you know, I don't, I'd try to really, you know, curtail the amount of time that I put into it. I'd only work in the morning and work in the evening, you know, after the kids were in bed. But what I found was that I would leave off writing or researching. And then throughout the day, this thing would just be on a loop in my head. And I couldn't break away. And it was like that for 10 years. When you, when it got published, were you already thinking about your next book? Or you just like, you know, I need a breather.

So when I was writing the book, I had kind of a, I was, if I wasn't thinking about a paragraph or a specific, you know, issue, I had this sort of mental loop going on in my head. And it was always like, what's the point, what's the point, what's the point, what's the point of this book, what's the point of this chapter, what's the point of this sentence? What am I doing? What's the point? What's the point?

What's the purpose? And that question was always on a loop in my head. And then when I turned the final manuscript in, And I was done. And I didn't have that question to think about. I was a little lost. And I found myself, like, I took a walk in my neighborhood. And I was just, and all of a sudden I found myself,

sort of subconsciously thinking, I started to say, what's next? What's next? What's next? What's next? And I just, and I just, I've, fortunately, through a lot of counseling, through some distance from the book, I've been able to, you know, take a pause. And I kind of gave myself, you know, mentally a year, you know, from the date of publication until, you know, so for a year.

So July 20th is when it came out. I'm giving myself until July 20th of 2022 before I really start, you know, buckling down or start beating myself up about what's next. I'm a psycho because Once I get done as soon as I get done and turn in the final manuscript Well first of all before that even happens I'm already plotting I already got that next book I'm before one of them is bubbled to the surface I'm ready to rock and roll and so by the time the book comes out When I one of my books gets published the other one is already

It's already being formulated and kind of being written Which is really annoying because I also have like the repeat loop in my head like oh this could be good this could be good and as soon as that I go there's no there's no moment to go ah cool no yeah no yeah so I mean there was maybe a an afternoon I did reward myself at the end of each chapter I would get I would get drunk and I wouldn't go out drinking or anything like that I never didn't I would just when you got done with the chapter would it be like that's the rough chapter Or is that like, hey, I mean, yeah, it was the first draft.

I knew that I was coming back for it. Yeah, yeah. But I mean, just getting, you know, putting that flag in the ground and being like, I'm done with that chapter. Like I felt like, you know, even if I knew that it wasn't perfect, even if I knew if I was going to have to come back, at least I knew. The meat was there. The meat was there. The content was there. And if I had let myself, you know, get that far, then I knew what the point of the chapter was.

I knew why that chapter was important and I knew the point that I was trying to make. So at least I had the, you know, the bones of the chapter. The structure was good, you know, whether or not I was going to come back and add stuff on, you know, the Cuban frogmen or something like that. Or, gosh. Where are you leaning towards your next book? You must be, must have an idea in that. I have an idea, but it's very private. Private.

All right. No one's going to steal it every your ideas. It's not that. Because no one has enough time or commitment. It has nothing to do with that. is that I need that in my head. If I say it out loud for whatever reason, it will be like, I need the motivation of it.

I need the unfinished quality of it to motivate me to. That's one thing I noticed is in seal training, guys that were like saying like, oh, I'm in seal training, I'm in seal training. Those guys didn't seem to make it. Yeah. So maybe it's the same kind of thing for you. You don't want to get it out there because that's,

I don't. It's almost like you get rewarded for it. You get a little mini reward. When someone goes, oh, wow, that sounds awesome. You already got paid. You're not allowing yourself to get paid. That's a good move. I like it.

I like it. Don't allow yourself to get paid. Don't go credit. Don't take credit. So you're not even taking any credit from me from Echo. Just taking nothing from us. You have to earn it over here. What's in here?

I was going to say, because no one's going to take your idea about some random document written in 1953 three about some, you know, new nuclear warhead that led to whatever. How'd you know? Yeah. There you go. Well, awesome, man. Thanks for coming down.

You welcome back here any times. I've got some ideas in my head for like some kind of a something to do with some sort of podcast scenario with you. I don't even know what it is yet. But yes. Yeah. We'll work something out like that. I'm committing.

Oh, right on. See? Well, you know, I kind of feel like I already did it because I just said it. So it's kind of like I got the reward. Hey, it's pretty much done. Hey, if you want to support this podcast, get some Jocco Fuel. We supported this podcast today, jorkegking and stacking some jocke. It's been a long day even for Echo Charles, who's usually in the cruise mode over there.

Are your vocal cords tired? I handled. Get some stuff from joccofuel.com. Get some mok. See, we haven't eaten today. So my mok detector is high. order right now. It's super hype right now. I don't want anything else. I don't want a steak. I don't want a cheeseburger. I don't want a turkey leg. I want milk right now. Plus, as far as your macros go, you're going to need that help this late in the day. Did I go catabolic earlier? I did Jackson Steel this morning. You're risking that big time right now. We're not going to let that happen. We get home. We get some milk, milk up in the system. And so we're good there. So check that out, joccofuel.com. Go to Wawa if you want to get some of these drinks. that are freaking awesome because I you know did we get jittery today did I get jittery

did you get jittery no you felt smooth all day good for you too by the way good 100% good for you're not gonna pay any price in the future are you thinking you're gonna get like type 2 diabetes because you drank some sugary drink because you're not because that's sweetened with monk fruit right there it's true that's what I'm talking about delicious David I mean this is my first energy drink ever yeah ever I don't think I've ever had a no yeah yeah Good move. That's weird. What'd you drink in Iraq?

Coffee. Okay, yeah. That'll do it. You're a coffee guy. Vitamin shop too. OriginUSA.com. If you want to get some jeans, if you want to get a belt,

if you want to get a wallet, if you want to get a pair of boots, if you need a jiu jitsu ghi. Jiu jitsu is going high right now. It's going high order. Everyone's training. You're feeling it. I feel it.

The whole world's training. Are you training, man? Training the jiu jihitsu? No, I don't have time. You're freaking sitting in an archive somewhere with your nose in a book, dude. I mean, for all the fans out there. Yeah, I'm training a lot. OriginUSA.com.

Go get yourself some cool stuff. All that is made in the United States of America. Look, we spent trying to fight communism. We fought against communism. And we're still fighting against communism, but it's not in the jungles anymore. Right now, it's, It's in your wallet. You can give your money to a communist country, literally.

You can do that. I recommend you don't. I recommend you don't give money to communism. I recommend you give it to democracy and America and hardworking American people. That's what we're talking about. OriginUSA.com. Go get some freedom, son. As opposed to supporting uniquely affordable labor.

Oh, that's what they call slave labor. That's what they call slave labor. That's true. Yeah, we're not down for that cause. Also, Jocko's door. Boom. Represent. We're on the path.

We're working out. We're lifting. Sometimes we want to represent. You want a shirt that says discipline equals freedom on it. A hoodie. A hat. The word good. Shirt locker.

Shirt locker. Shirt locker. That's a uniquely unique. Unique. Sometimes that's education. Talks himself to do a corner to no escape. No, bread. No escape.

such thing either way though what that is it's the different unique shirt with unique designs very um unique good good feedback on those ones good feedback what's the latest can you say what the latest was what was the last the this past one it's April right now so March was the one that you came out with a long time ago everybody must get stoned oh yeah that one was controversial Ben controversial controversial I made it we made a shirt so I heard from the nom guys One nom guy in a particular was like yeah, he went to get his gun from the armory after he had been home and he went to check out his weapon Someone else had taken it to Vietnam his stoner came back

So a guy took his stoner on deployment did a six-month deployment came back when he went to pick his weapon up from the armory etched in the butt stock it said everybody must get stoned and I was like that's the best thing ever You know the stoner machine gun if you don't know The stoner 63 that That's what a lot of guys, a lot of seals carried in Vietnam. And it's a badass weapon. So we made that t-shirt. So you could get a cool t-shirt like that.

Some people didn't like it, huh? Well, they're scared. They were, they were thinking we were talking about the marijuana. They were sensitive to the controversial nature. Some people don't like marijuana. Some people don't like guns. It's true. You know, they had more to do with guns than marijuana.

Had actually nothing to do with, well. Yeah. You hit a lot of folks. Yeah, the friction point was the marijuana, not the guns. Yeah. That's my feedback. Don't you feel like your. kind of in a stoked situation with someone's like,

oh yeah, bro, everyone must get stoned, but what's the gun? Well, it's a stoner 63. Nom, what? It's a conversation starter. Anyways, Sherlocker, if you want to get cool stuff, check it out. Jocco store.com, subscribe to the podcast, subscribe to jocco underground.com, so we can be standing strong in the event of a total meltdown of our democratic society.

Also with that, and, you know, that is true. That is true. but you get life advice every week from Jocko. Brad, tell me, come on, every week. Life advice. You need life advice. Boom, ask Jocko every single week. I answer questions.

I answer all. There's like a special way to contact us. If you're part of the, of the Jocker Underground, then you can submit questions and answer them. So get some of that YouTube. We got a YouTube channel.

You can see the videos that I am the assistant director of, therefore they are awesome. And even the ones that Echo just works on by himself are okay. Thank you. psychological warfare Flipside canvas Dakota Meyer He's got cool stuff to hang on your wall Dude if we made a if we made a Ben Milligan

T-shirt what would it be? Oh I mean you'd sell a dozen Can you imagine? I wonder what could we do What would it be? I mean how pale am I It'd have to be something like to To capture you know

This is as tan as I am This isn't black and white It only gets worse Yeah if a shirt comes off It's only worse So it would have to be something super white. Yeah, yeah. You're just like vague outline.

Oh, do like, do like a white t-shirt with like a white on white. Yeah, with like golden. Like, yeah. And then it could just say mulligan. We'll come up with something. That's good. You'd be surprised, man. People would be stoked to represent.

They'd be like, oh, yeah. Purvers. Books by water beneath the walls again. Bruh. I know you like the title. I get it. I get it. Next time you're going to title a book.

Just come and consult. Come and consult. You got it. Come and consult. Hit me up. We'll spend a 15-minute conversation. There's a beautiful, a beautiful and amazing and powerful and strong context behind that title that four people get. And it is, as I said, this is to me the most important.

historical book about the seals and I'm gonna also say for me the most important historical book about special operations and you write about everyone in there the rangers the special forces the scouts and raiders it's all in there it's just an outstanding book so pick up that book buy water beneath the walls you know what do me favor right now as you're listening write this down buy water beneath the walls because there's no way you're going to remember of that time. So there you go. Hey, I've written a bunch books too.

Final spin. That's the novel that I wrote. Leadership Strategy and Taxis Field Manual. The code, the evaluations, protocols, discipline, freedom field manual. Way of the Warrior Kid, one, two, three, and four. Get those books for the kids that you know. Please, please do that.

It will legitimately guaranteed make their lives better. Make them better into better human beings. Make them more capable for the world. And the world is not an easy place. Mikey and the Dragons. Get that for the little munchkins running around the house. About Face, extreme ownership, dichotomy leadership.

Check out those books as well. Eschlamfront.com. If you need some help with leadership inside your organization, online training at extremeownership.com. This is not the only place to learn leadership, and leadership is not an inoculation that you get, and now you're good to go. You've got to train just like the gym.

That's why we got extremeownership.com, so we can train you every single day. and you want to ask me some questions. Go on there. I'm on there. I'm on a Zoom call talking to me. I'm five inches away from your head answering your questions. If you want to help service members through an incredible organization, go to America's Mighty Warriors.

org. It's Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee, helping in so many different ways. She's tremendous, and it's a tremendous organization. Don't forget about Horses and Heroes. Heroes and Horses.com. Micah Fink. He's doing cool stuff on horses. Running, riding horses through the wilderness.

41 days. Legitness. We're on social media. We're right in there inside the algorithms. Don't get sucked into him. I'm at Jocco Willink. Echoes at Echo Charles. Ben is at B. Milligan 3 on Instagram and then Ben H. Milligan on Twitter.

What do you post on Instagram? Anything? Yeah, I post on there. I'll try and put on like a post a week. I'm not super active on it. I'm not super good. But I'll, if I'm, usually I try and tie something back to, you know, American history or something like that. I just was down at the World War II Museum, which is incredible.

There was a right outside the World War II Museum, there was a statue of Anne Frank, and they just happened to position it directly in front of a shell. Pock section of Utah Beach that they had brought back and that seemed like a wow just an incredible like um it just I mean it made the whole the whole effort the whole thing seemed worthwhile like just what do these guys do and what did they do it for it's right here everything's right here awesome cool stuff so check out his Instagram and uh Ben thanks once again for coming on I really appreciate it appreciate this is fantastic appreciate what you've done for the team Not only through your service in the teams, but also for this book and thanks to all the military personnel out there that are writing history as we speak by keeping us free around the world

To the police law enforcement Firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all the first responders Thank you for what you are doing right now to keep us safe here at home and Once again, there are opportunities out there. But they're not going to just, they're not going to beat down your door. You got to look for them. You got to, there's an expression we used to have in the teams. Look for work.

Remember that expression? Look for work. So when you're a new guy and you're hitting a target, a training operation, and you don't really know what to do. So you're kind of standing there with your weapon at high port, not doing anything. And some freaking platoon chief is going to go, hey, willing, look for work. And that means you pick up your weapon and you go look for an angle to cover. Well, that's what you, that's what the seals did.

That's, that's where we came from. We came from a position where we were just out there looking for work. Don't do what everyone else is doing. First of all, don't just stand there and do nothing, but don't just do what someone else is doing. It's already getting done. Look for the angle that's not being covered. Look for the job that no one else wants. Look for the job that is harder.

That's more complex. that's cold and wet and miserable, the job that requires more effort than anybody, anything else, and more than anybody else is willing to put up with, that's where the opportunity is, and then go and get after it. And until next time,

this is Ben Milligan and Echo and Jocko. Out.